


The Boy in the Notebook

by Tea_For_One_Please



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Action, All very minor, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bisexual Peter Parker, Blood and Injury, Boys In Love, Boys Kissing, Canon Related, Canon-Typical Violence, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Gay Harley Keener, Harley Keener Needs a Hug, Love Letters, M/M, Mentions of Racism, Mild Blood, Not Canon Compliant, POV Alternating, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Post-Spider-Man: Homecoming, Slow Burn, Strangers to Lovers, Threats of Rape/Non-Con, basically peter beats up a potential rapist, things are more or less the same but a few differences
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-22
Updated: 2021-01-27
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:21:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 49,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27154417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tea_For_One_Please/pseuds/Tea_For_One_Please
Summary: Lonely and frustrated by everyone around him seeming to find love, Peter Parker leaves an anonymous journal for a potential lover to find, daring them to write back to him, not really expecting anyone to find it.When moody, closeted Harley Keener chances upon it, through the words of this invisible stranger, he finds a friend who sees him differently from the rest of the world, and a love he never thought he'd attain.
Relationships: Harley Keener/Peter Parker
Comments: 38
Kudos: 197





	1. The Notebook - Peter

**Author's Note:**

> The concept of this is loosely based on 'Dash and Lily's Book of Dares' by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan, a book I loved as a teenager, but you'll be able to understand what's going on here if you haven't read it!
> 
> It should always be obvious, but just in case: paragraphs in italics indicate Peter's writing, and paragraphs in bold indicate Harley's writing. On my Word document they have different fonts but AO3 doesn't have that feature, sadly.
> 
> Canon alterations that may be important to know:  
> \- Harley and Tony have never met  
> \- Harley and his family have always lived in New York  
> \- Although the Avengers Compound is a thing, Tony's also kept operations running at the Tower
> 
> I think that covers it, although I may add new ones if I think of them. Enjoy!

The normally vibrant laboratory hums quietly, a singular figure hunched over a small robotic mechanism, his tongue peeking through his lips with concentration. With a gentle _click_ , the automatic lights in the laboratory flicker on, and Peter blinks in surprise.

“Posture, Mr Parker.” The familiar amused drawl of Tony Stark startles him, and he whirls around to see his mentor leaning against the doorframe, a steaming cup of coffee in his hands. His vest is undone and his tie loosened – a clear sign that he’s finished work for the day. “You don’t want to be my age and staring at the sidewalk all day because you can’t sit properly.”

Peter gasps as he squints at the clock on the wall, having completely lost track of the time. “Damn it,” he mumbles, throwing a blanket over his project to protect it from dust.

“Late for dinner?”

“Not yet,” Peter replies, “but I will be in…” He grimaces as he glances back at the clock. “…seventeen minutes.”

Tony pulls a face. “Doesn’t pay to have that lovely aunt of yours mad at you.”

“Mr Stark, you’re engaged,” Peter says with a disapproving look, but he knows he’s joking. “I’m screwed if the trains are late, though.”

“Look, if you’re angling for a ride, Happy can take you,” Tony says, rolling his eyes. “It’s not like he’s overworked. Or I could, even.”

“It’s fine,” Peter insists. “I like taking the train. Besides,” he goes on, hesitating only for a moment, “it always feels weird when Happy drives down my street in that fancy car.”

“Well, if it bothers you that much, I’m sure I can borrow an – I don’t know, what’s a cheap car? A Honda civic or something? – from one of the staff.”

“Thank you, Mr Stark,” Peter says, unable to suppress a laugh, “but I’m good.”

“Okay, squirt,” Tony says, raising his hands in surrender. “See you next week.”

Peter steps out onto the street, the colossal Tower casting a shadow over several blocks as the sun sinks over Newark. He winces at the wall of sound that greets him – vehicle engines and horns; street vendors shouting about their wares, sirens in the near distance – there’s a good reason he generally limits his patrols to Queens, and doesn’t often venture into Manhattan. With his overly-stimulated senses, it often feels like he’s living inside a bass drum.

He weaves among the waves of commuters, few of whom pay him much attention: a major advantage of being relatively small and slight. As he approaches the subway station, though, he can’t help noticing that the sirens are getting louder, and his heart sinks.

Sure enough, all the stone staircases into the subway have been taped off, with NYPD cars and vans stationed at every corner of the intersection. The noise is horrific: on top of everything else, angry commuters are shouting at the police officers, who are calling over megaphones, and blasting their sirens intermittently, in an attempt to drown out and disperse the gathered crowds.

Peter’s phone buzzes in his pocket, and he jumps an inch into the air. He pulls it out to see a text from Tony: **_still don’t want a ride?_**

He turns around to see a sleek black car – smart enough to be Tony’s, but discreet enough that no one else seems to have noticed the eccentric tycoon waving at Peter from the driver’s window. Tony grins as Peter climbs into the passenger seat, waving away his sheepish words of thanks and focusing instead on navigating through the incessant onslaught of cars.

Astonishingly, the police wave him through, and Peter slides down in his seat, hoping not to be spotted by anyone he knows. If someone like Flash Thompson were to find out that Tony Stark bypassed a police barricade to drive him home, he would never hear the end of it.

“So, what’s on your mind?” Tony asks as they pull onto the Queensboro Bridge.

“Hm?” Peter says, barely listening.

“You’ve been quiet today,” he replies. “Something wrong?”

“It’s nothing,” Peter says, trying to sound casual. The silence that follows suggests that Tony knows he’s not being truthful, and he sighs. “It’s just that Ned started going out with Betty Brant, and now all he does is…” He pauses, trying to find a suitably scathing turn of phrase. “…wax lyrical about the ‘great mystery’ that is love.”

“Okay,” Tony says, clearly processing this, “so I suppose the obvious question is, are you annoyed, or do you envy him?”

“I don’t envy him,” Peter shoots back, a little too quickly, and Tony emits a low chuckle. “Okay,” he admits. “Maybe a little. I mean, come on! You saw how my last date went, right?”

Now it’s Tony’s turn to grimace – discovering that his date’s father was an illegal weapons dealer who tried to kill him several times has clearly shot his confidence a little. “Maybe the problem is that your social circle is quite small,” he suggests. “Maybe try branching out.”

“How do you mean?”

“I’m going to sound really old here,” Tony continues with a smile, “but everyone your age assumes that you have to date someone you already know.”

“Okay,” Peter says slowly, “so what’s your suggestion? Like, Tinder or something?”

“Kid, you’re fifteen.”

“Right, stupid idea.”

“How about this: find a notebook, or journal, or something, and write in it, and leave it somewhere for someone to find. Obviously don’t put any personal information or anything in it,” he says hastily before Peter can interrupt, “just write what it’s for, and where to leave it with a reply. Be creative.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Peter says flatly. “Where would I leave it? In a trash can on 39th?”

“That’s up to you. And you’re right, nothing may come of it, but what’s the harm in trying?”

“What’s the harm?” he repeats in disbelief. “Mr Stark, I could get catfished or something!”

“Which is why it’s actually safer than online dating,” Tony points out. “There’s no paper trail. If you feel unsafe at any point, you can just stop. This person knows nothing about you, or where to find you. They can’t hack you, or find your IP address, or anything.”

“I’ll think about it,” Peter says finally, and Tony nods. “Where did you even get the idea?”

“One of Pepper’s magazines,” Tony says, and Peter raises an eyebrow. “It was in the bathroom, and I got bored! I – ”

“Gross,” Peter mutters. “TMI much?”

“Anyway, kid,” Tony interrupts, clearly keen to move the conversation back into safer territory, “you’re Spider-Man. If anyone gives you any bother over this, you can take care of yourself.” He pulls up to the curb outside Peter’s building and reaches into the backseat for his briefcase. “Pretty sure…” he mutters, rummaging around inside, then his eyes light up in triumph. “Here you go,” he says, pulling out a notebook. “Consider this a start-up loan. You can repay me by letting me make a speech at your wedding.”

Peter rolls his eyes but takes the notebook. It’s a good one, too: a proper Moleskine, with thick-leaf pages bound in wine-red faux leather. “Thanks, Mr Stark. For this, and the ride.”

“No problem, Pete. Say hi to your aunt for me,” Tony calls as Peter shuts the car door. Peter lifts a hand in farewell, before stowing the notebook in his backpack and heading inside.

He twists his key in the lock, aware that he’s later than he should be. As he kicks off his sneakers, Aunt May’s head appears at the kitchen door, and offers him a relieved smile. “You know I get worried when you’re late. Where have you been?”

“Sorry, Aunt May,” he says, tossing his backpack onto his bed and joining her in the kitchen. “I was at the Tower, and I lost track of time.” She hums and arches an eyebrow, ruffling his hair to signal forgiveness. He laughs and pushes her off, then slumps down at the table, where she’s just set down a plate of spaghetti and Costco meatballs.

“So, how did everything go today?” she asks, twirling spaghetti around her fork.

He shrugs. “Ned and Betty being gross again.”

“ _That’s_ the highlight of your day?” she says, amused.

“Oh no, very much the low point,” he counters. “I’m just setting the bar low, so everything else sounds good.” She laughs, and he feels a little more normal. “No, it was alright. I got a ninety-two in my chemistry quiz.”

“What happened the other eight percent?” she asks sternly, and he stares blankly at her in disbelief, until she grins, and says, “You know I’m kidding, right? That’s fantastic!”

“It’s fine,” he says modestly. “I think I could have done better, though. I mixed up propene and butene, and I forgot the pH level of ammonium, which I shouldn’t have.”

“For God’s sake, Peter, it’s still an excellent grade,” she chuckles, shaking her head. “What about at the Tower, how did you get on?”

“Pretty good.” He perks up a little; even a few months on, he forgets occasionally that he can now actually talk to her about what he does there. “I’ve been designing a new kind of web trap that latches onto a heat source.”

“Is that safe?”

“Mm, should be.” He pauses to spear a meatball, and chews it as he talks. “It’ll be useful if I know where a bad guy is, but can’t get a clear shot.” She smiles fondly at him, and he knows it’s because he just said _bad guy_ , as if he’s eight years old and playing with his Iron Man action figure again. But what else is he supposed to say?

Honestly, he’s just glad he doesn’t have to sneak around her anymore. Although she insists that he be home by twelve-thirty at the absolute latest (one-thirty if he doesn’t have school the next day), he feels a lot better about going out on patrol now that Aunt May knows he’s doing it. He always used to live in fear of crawling back through his bedroom window to find her waiting for him, having found him out. Which eventually, of course, was exactly what happened.

It’s got him in trouble a few times, though: on one occasion during Christmas vacation, he arrived back nearly an hour past his curfew, because he’d been helping the fire department evacuate a burning building. He tried to explain this to her, but she wasn’t having it, and grounded him for a week. He was furious at her, and she at him, they stubbornly endured nearly five days of icy silence before they finally talked it out.

This evening, however, Peter can tell things are fine between them, despite his slight tardiness, so resolves to head out a bit later. For the moment, though, he decides to throw caution to the wind and try writing something in the red notebook.

He curls up on his bed, and digs the Moleskine out of his bag. He turns it over in his hands and flicks through the pages, coarse and cream with the faintest lines running across each sheet. He reaches absently to his desk, feeling around for the fountain pen that Uncle Ben always used to write his letters. He doesn’t use it often, but this notebook demands something a bit special than the ballpoints he normally uses.

Opening the notebook to its first page, Peter taps the pen against his cheek, trying to think of how to start. After all, whoever finds this, he doesn’t want to scare them off immediately. Yes, writing a whole paragraph on the first page would be a little much for someone finding this. He has to ease them in gently.

 _Hello_ , he writes, _if you’re reading this, congratulations!_ Then, in smaller letters, he adds, _You’ve passed the first challenge. If you’re interested, there are a few more on the following pages._

The biggest problem he has to overcome is where to leave the Moleskine once he’s finished writing it – after all, its location may well play a part in what he asks the finder to do next. He smiles as an idea occurs to him, and he pulls out his cell phone. He selects FaceTime and taps MJ’s name.

She offers him a single, upwards nod as the call connects (which from her, is basically the equivalent of a forceful hug). “What’s up, nerd?”

“I need a favour.”

“For the last time, Parker, I’m not doing your pre-calc homework.”

“That’s not it,” he says, moving the phone further from his face so he can flip her off. “You still work at the Grand Central Library?”

“Yeah,” she replies, squinting curiously at him. “Why?”

“I’ll tell you,” he says sternly, “as long as you promise not to laugh.”

“Promise,” she says, holding up two fingers.

Peter takes a deep breath and starts explaining the ridiculous plan. “…so basically, is it okay if I say to give the notebook to you if they find it?”

She considers this. “I didn’t laugh,” she says slowly. “I didn’t, however, agree to withhold criticism. That is, therefore, the most stupid idea I’ve ever heard.”

“Thank you for that,” he says, more politely than he wants to be, as she’s sort of the hinge upon which this plan rests. “Will you do it, though?”

“Eh, sure,” she shrugs. “It might make the job more entertaining.”

“You’re the best,” he says, and she shrugs, clearly indicating that she knows this.

“What d’you get on the chem quiz?” she asks before he can disconnect the call, and he curses himself for not hanging up faster.

“Ninety-two,” he says, and she smirks.

“Ninety-four.” She throws up a peace sign and hangs up. He curses under his breath and tosses his phone to the end of his bed, so as not to be distracted any further, then unscrews the lid of the pen again and turns to the second page.

_It’s worth saying at this point that in order to keep reading you must fulfil the following criteria:_

  1. _you must be single_
  2. _you must want a relationship_
  3. _you must be around 15 years of age (i.e. plus or minus 1 year)_
  4. _you must be interested in guys (your own gender doesn’t matter to me!)_



_If you do not meet all four of these criteria, please read no further, and kindly replace this notebook where you found it. You have value and are appreciated, but this book is not for you. If, however, all of those statements are true, please feel free to turn to the next page._

Peter scans this and nods approvingly. Clear and direct, but not cold and unfeeling. Perfect. He turns the page and continues.

_If you have made it this far, then it means you want a relationship, correct? That being the case, I’d like to get an idea of what you’re like as a person. I’m informed you can discover a lot about a person by the books they read; very conveniently, you happen to be standing in a library. I need you to choose three books – two fairly specific, one less so._

Peter has to bite back a smirk as he writes the next few lines.

_This endeavour, shall we call it, will require no small amount of nerve on both our parts. I need to be sure that you’re a brave person, or this won’t work out, I’m afraid. To this end, I challenge you to go to the adult literature section, and pick out the dirtiest book you can find. I leave the choice to you._

_Second, I need to know that I can trust you. I thought it prudent not to include many personal details in this notebook, but all the same, I would still prefer to rest assured that I will not be ridiculed because of anything written in here. Pick out a book that lets me know that I can have absolute confidence in you._

_Finally, pick any book from any section that you feels best represents you and your life. This one’s entirely up to you, so choose wisely!_

_When you have all three books, go to a desk and ask for MJ. She will give you your next instructions. Good luck!_

As he carefully dots the final exclamation point, Peter exhales deeply, suddenly nervous. He has two more pages he needs to write, but there’s no time now. It’s already nearly 8pm, and he’s not even in his suit yet.

He shoves the notebook into a drawer in his desk and starts unbuttoning his shirt, nudging open his wardrobe with one foot, where his suit is hanging on a peg on the door. His undershirt, jeans and socks come off, and Peter spares just a moment to examine his reflection in the mirror before tugging the suit on, jumping up to allow himself to pull it up his legs. He slips his arms in and pulls the mask over his head, blowing a stray curl off his forehead. _I really must get a haircut_ , he muses as he shoves the window up.

“Bye, May!” he yells, his voice only slightly muffled by the mask.

“Shut the window after you, it’s cold!” she calls from the living room.

This done, Peter leaps off the fire escape and releases a long web-line from the dispenser on his right wrist. It latches to a nearby building, breaking his fall; he swings upwards in a graceful arc, rolling lazily in mid-air before tumbling downwards again. He lets out an involuntary whoop of joy: it might have been more than a year since he became Spider-Man, but somehow this feeling of soaring through the cold January air – the freedom of tumbling towards the ground with the confidence of being able to swing up again whenever he likes – it never goes away, or gets old. He loves this.

He never likes to patrol too close to home in case he blows his cover, so once he’s a few blocks away, Peter settles down on a rooftop, sheltering from the icy wind behind some large ventilation tubes. “Okay, Karen,” he murmurs, “let’s see what the scanner has to say.”

“ _On it, Peter,_ ” says the cool female voice in his mask’s earpiece. “ _Tapping into the police scanner now._ ” He listens intently for a few minutes, hearing nothing that might require his assistance, but frowns when he hears raised voices nearby.

“Karen, switch it off for a minute, please.” Immediately the scanner volume is muted, and Peter homes in on the voices, leaping across to the next building for closer examination.

“Just get out of here, will you?” It’s a man’s voice, with a hint of AAVE to it. He hears jeering laughter, and finally spots the scene: there is indeed an older man there, whom Peter has seen sleeping rough in the past. With him is a group of five youths – three boys and two girls in their early twenties, by the look of things – who are emptying his satchel into the street.

“Oh, no you don’t,” Peter breathes, and drops down onto the sidewalk, landing catfooted in the alley behind them.

“What are you going to do, ------?” spits one of the young men, and Peter winces at the word he uses. Without warning, he shoots a long web-line into his back and yanks him backwards, causing the offending young man to stumble backwards, and fall onto the asphalt.

“You know,” Peter says conversationally, examining the tips of his fingers, “you can tell a lot about a person by the contents of their bag.”

“It’s Spider-Man!” one of the girls hisses.

“But maybe that isn’t what you had in mind,” Peter continues, his mask’s eye-lenses narrowing angrily. The group make a run for it, and Peter makes sure to tread heavily on the fingers of the one on the ground as he goes after them. “Web-bomb,” he says quietly to Karen, who dutifully activates the high-impact gadget. He shoots two, to be on the safe side, and they latch onto the hoods of the two wearing jackets. One more press to the web-shooter detonates them, wrapping each pair tightly in the sticky webs and throwing them to the ground.

Peter’s heightened senses almost sting him in their urgency, and he steps neatly to one side. The thug he knocked over has got to his feet, and just thrust a knife into the exact area where Peter’s shoulder-blade would have been. Peter’s knee collides painfully with his attacker’s abdomen, winding him, giving Peter time to smack the knife out of his hand. He kicks it away from them, hard, and sends it skidding across the sidewalk and down a storm drain.

Having disposed of the weapon, Peter knocks the young man’s legs out from under him and webs him firmly to the sidewalk. “Karen, call the police,” he says shortly. “Inform them of an armed mugging and attempted racially-motivated assault.” He glances around the scene once more, then stoops down to help the homeless man gather his things, some of which have rolled into the road. “Are you alright, sir?” he asks, handing them back.

“Fine,” the man says, throwing the youths a dirty look. “Thank you, Spider-Man.”

“I’d advise you not to hang around,” Peter says gently. “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you the police may not take your side.”

He lets out a hollow laugh. “You can say that again.”

“If you need a place to sleep tonight, there’s a F.E.A.S.T. centre a few blocks away,” Peter suggests. “Just turn right at the end of the road and follow the river until you see it. You’d be welcome there.”

The old man nods in acknowledgement. “Appreciate it.” He takes the last of his things from Peter and shuffles off in the direction Peter pointed him.

Peter watches him go, then turns to the man who had the knife with severe disdain. A lot of people who commit crime are desperate, and in such situations he tries to avoid calling the police. He’s aware that the police cause more problems than they solve, so instead, he generally just stops their crime, throws some light-hearted humour their way, and attempts to offer the perpetrators alternative solutions.

Now, though, he looks down at his captive with revolted fury. “You disgust me,” he says coldly. “You attack a homeless man for no reason at all, and as if that wasn’t enough, your language is despicable.”

“Fuck you,” the man snarls, and Peter promptly shoots a web at his mouth, essentially gagging him.

“You see that?” Peter says, pointing above them, his voice still hard and unfeeling, sparing no witty remarks for such a low-life. “That security camera records the entire street to protect the store, and I just sent the entire tape to the police. With any luck you’ll spend at least a few years in prison. Don’t expect a visit from me.” He hears approaching sirens, and the street starts to flicker with red and blue lights. He takes a running leap into the air and disappears onto a nearby rooftop watching with grim satisfaction as the hooligans are bundled into police cars and driven away.

Despite having planned to finish off writing in the Moleskine when he returned home, by the time gets home a few hours later, Peter’s cold, damp and utterly exhausted. He’ll have time tomorrow, after all – he can write on the train, and give it to MJ when he gets to school, so she can deposit it somewhere in the library.

He’d love a shower, but he doesn’t want to risk waking May, who has to wake up for work well before he does. Instead, he activates the suit’s heater to warm up and dry off. Feeling considerably more comfortable and a good deal more sleepy, he peels off his suit and crawls into bed in his underwear. Within minutes, the silence of his bedroom is punctuated by soft snores, all thoughts of the notebook completely forgotten.


	2. The Library - Harley

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harley, researching for a school paper, chances upon a notebook with some very unusual instructions.

Harley stifles a sneeze as he rinses shampoo from his hair, keen to finish before the hot water runs out. He generally tries to be up in time to shower before Abbie, but he overslept this morning, and now there’s no telling when icy water will start cascading down his back. The prospect is not a pleasant one, and his skin prickles at the thought.

There are, Harley believes, two significant problems with having unusually thick hair – it takes forever to wash, and forever to dry. Three, if he counts the fact that it bears an uncanny resemblance to a bird’s nest when he first gets out of bed.

He’s on the final rinse when it happens: with the unpleasant sense that he might as well be bathing in the Hudson, the water temperature plummets, and Harley gasps from the shock. He fumbles wildly for the faucets, and lets out an involuntary shiver. _What it must be like to have water that heats on demand_ , he thinks bitterly as he reaches for his towel. A sudden _crack_ makes him freeze, and he closes his eyes in despair as he realises he’s just knocked his cell phone from its position on the windowsill, onto the grubby tiles of the floor. He climbs out of the bath, still dripping wet, and stoops down.

“Please don’t be broken, please don’t be broken,” he whispers, turning it over. Because, you know, why wouldn’t it land face-down? “Ah, shit.”

Technically it could be worse – the screen hasn’t shattered, mercifully – but there’s still an ugly, conspicuous crack running the length of the screen, forking just off-centre and trailing down into the two lower corners.

Bypassing most of the stages of grief, he moodily wraps his towel around him and retreats to his bedroom. Or, more accurately, the bedroom he shares with Abbie. This is hardly an ideal situation – no sixteen-year-old wants to even co-habit with their younger sibling, let alone share a bedroom – but it is what it is. Harlem might not be upmarket, but it’s still Manhattan.

“Out,” he says abruptly as he walks in. Abbie rolls her eyes, but complies, sauntering out and slamming the door behind her.

Harley unwraps the towel and runs it savagely through his hair, in a futile attempt to dry it a little before he leaves. It wouldn’t be his first time arriving at school with his hair almost frozen, but he’d rather avoid it. Examining his phone with one hand, he pulls a flannel and a fresh pair of jeans out of his dresser with the other. The damage is apparently purely aesthetic, and not extensive, which is a relief. He can live with a cracked screen for a few weeks, until he’s saved enough to have it repaired.

“Harley!”

“Yeah, mom?”

“I need you to pick Abbie up from orchestra today!”

He sighs and pulls the flannel on over a plain t-shirt, before opening the door and joining his mother in the kitchen. “I can’t, I have to go to the library.”

“But I’m working until seven, and I can’t meet her.”

“She’s nearly fourteen,” Harley says in disbelief. “Can’t she walk home by herself?”

“No,” she says firmly. “She doesn’t finish orchestra until five, and I don’t want her walking home in the dark.”

“But I have a paper to research!”

“Then get your books and do the work here.”

“Yeah, because that always goes well,” he mutters, and she glares at him. “Fine,” he says, widening his eyes incredulously when she’s not looking. “I have to get to school.”

“Have a good day,” she says, but her tone is cool, and he’s not inclined to return the pleasantry. He scoops up his backpack and heads out, still annoyed.

A persistent sleet is falling as he steps out, and he tugs his beanie down over his ears. It occurs to him that putting on any kind of hat with damp hair was probably a terrible decision, but he’s too cold to care. He shivers, and turns up the collar of his jacket as he jogs towards the bus shelter. To his relief, he only has to endure a few minutes of this miserable weather before the bus cruises up to the stop. He hands the driver the correct change, then heads towards a cluster of empty seats near the back of the bus, keen to be left alone.

After all, this is how everyone sees him: that quiet, moody kid, who wears odd clothes and keeps his distance from the world. And since that’s what people already think, Harley doesn’t see a lot of point in proving them wrong.

They stop a few more times before someone bounds up to him and taps him on the shoulder, making him jump. He sets his teeth, bracing himself for an argument, but finds himself nose-to-nose with Zacharias Prentice, one of very few people whom Harley would call a friend, and mean it. As usual, Zach’s grinning from ear to ear, and Harley can’t help but crack a dry smile in return.

“Who pissed in your cereal, Keener?” Zach asks, settling into the seat next to Harley.

“My mom,” he says with the briefest of eye-rolls, and explains about having to walk Abbie home.

“Hm,” he replies, nodding thoughtfully. “Didn’t you say yesterday that you’re working tonight?”

Harley buries his face in his hands and groans. “Fuck, I completely forgot.” He pulls out his phone again with some trepidation and finds his text thread with his mom. “She’s gonna be _pissed_.”

“Rather you than me, buddy,” Zach says with feeling. “Any requests for your funeral?”

“Just throw me in a lake in the park,” he replies as he taps out a message. “It’ll be fun to scare a fisherman.” Zach thumbs the stop button about a minute before they reach the school gate, and Harley sighs as he thinks of the day ahead, calling a word of thanks to the driver as they step out.

It’s not really that Harley dislikes school; he’s clever, and he knows he could excel if he really wanted to. The thing is, he’s seen what happens to the honours students: they never sleep, some of them. Burdened with AP classes and extra-curriculars, they spend hours in the school library, weeping into their textbooks and trembling with horror at an A-minus grade. And he’s only a sophomore, so how much worse will it be in two years’ time?

Harley figured out in freshman year that this wasn’t who he wanted to become, so he does his level best to fly under the radar. He’s good at it, too – he keeps his marks high enough that he doesn’t fail, but low enough that he doesn’t draw attention. He participates in class enough to meet that grade, but not so much that he garners a reputation as a know-it-all. He runs the mile in nine-and-a-half minutes, making sure to never finish in the first ten. He partakes in exactly one extra-curricular: the robotics club, because it only meets once a week, and he actually gets to reap the benefits of what he makes.

No, his sole ambition is to remain unnoticed until the final exams of his senior year, which are the ones he needs to get into college. He takes a sort of grim satisfaction in imagining his teachers’ astonishment when they find out his final grades.

The day passes, as it often does, in a haze. Homeroom. Math. World History. Recess. Physics. Gym. Lunch. Double English to finish the day.

“So where are you headed?” Zach asks, catching up with him at his locker.

“Grand Central Library,” Harley says, retrieving his gym bag and textbooks from the morning.

“Seriously? What for?” Wrinkling his nose in confusion, Zach pulls out a pack of chewing gum and offers Harley a piece.

“I’m making a start on our physics paper,” he replies, closing the locker and taking a stick from the packet. “The one due just before spring break starts.”

“That’s weeks away!”

“But not all of us can risk leaving it all until the final week,” Harley says, nudging him with his shoulder. “Some of us have, you know, jobs and shit.”

“Touché,” Zach says with a grin. “Well, have a good weekend, okay?”

“Yeah, you too.” Harley raises a hand in farewell as Zach takes his seat on the bus, and wanders away from the school, to catch a different bus into downtown Manhattan.

He likes going downtown because it allows him to pretend, just for a little while, that he has another life. A life where he can wander through Times Square, and he can actually go to see the shows advertised on the massive screens and billboards. A life where he can browse the market stalls and boutiques, and genuinely consider buying something there. A life where he can sit at one of the little coffee shops, watching the world go by, and just order another drink each time a waiter passes him. A life where, when he’s tired, he can walk into an apartment building and get the elevator to one of the highest floors, and look out over Central Park in his pyjamas.

But as far as Harley is concerned, none of these things will ever be attainable to him. Instead, he plunges his gloved hands deep into the pockets of his jacket and keeps walking, putting his head down to protect his face from the sleet.

When he reaches the library, he finds an unoccupied table and tucks his backpack under a chair. Then, to make it absolutely clear that the seat is taken, he hangs his damp jacket over the back support. It’s not generally advised to leave personal items unattended, but the science sections are in sight of the desk, so he figures it’s probably okay.

Keeping his belongings in his peripheral vision, he wanders over to the bookshelves, scanning the spines for potentially relevant titles. He picks out a few and tucks them under his arm; he may not need them all, but there’s no harm in looking. As he pulls out one final book, he sees something which surprises him.

A small, unmarked, wine-red book just tipped over, and is now resting diagonally against its neighbour. Intrigued and puzzled in equal measure, Harley takes his reference books back to his desk, then returns to the shelf to examine the red book. He pulls it out and examines it: there’s no title, no author, no synopsis. And on the back cover, the Moleskine logo is emblazoned into the faux leather, confirming his suspicions. This is clearly somebody’s notebook. This shouldn’t be here, surely?

Harley takes a few steps towards the information desk, intending to hand it in, when his curiosity gets the better of him, and he opens the front cover and starts to read.

_Hello! If you’re reading this, congratulations!_

It's all a little _Harry Potter_ for Harley's taste, but bemused, he keeps reading nonetheless.

_You’ve passed the first challenge. If you’re interested, there are a few more on the following pages._

Harley turns the page, intrigued by this bizarre epistle.

_It’s worth saying at this point that in order to keep reading you must fulfil the following criteria:_

  1. _you must be single_
  2. _you must want a relationship_
  3. _you must be around 15 years of age (i.e. plus or minus 1 year)_
  4. _you must be interested in guys (your own gender doesn’t matter to me!)_



Harley reads all of this in about four seconds, then returns to the top of the page and reads it again, to make sure he’s reading it correctly. Having confirmed that he’s not imagining it, he glances around him, trying to see any hidden cameras that might indicate that he’s on a prank show.

This would be far less peculiar if he did not entirely match the description set out in the book. He is indeed single, and not exactly happily so. He turned sixteen last month, so he’s well within the acceptable margin. As for the final caveat, well, that’s certainly true, although he’s never admitted it to anybody.

_If you do not meet all four of these criteria, please read no further, and kindly replace this notebook where you found it. You have value and are appreciated, but this book is not for you. If, however, all of those statements are true, please feel free to turn to the next page._

Harley makes to turn the page, but hesitates. This is… ridiculous, right? He can’t be seriously interested in whatever this anonymous writer is proposing, can he? It briefly crosses his mind that this is probably how most abductions begin, but then he realises that potential kidnappers probably aren’t as picky as the nutcase that has written this. Surprisingly, this thought is a comforting one, and he turns the page.

_If you have made it this far, then it means you want a relationship, correct? That being the case, I’d like to get an idea of what you’re like as a person. I’m informed you can discover a lot about a person by the books they read; very conveniently, you happen to be standing in a library. I need you to choose three books – two fairly specific, one less so._

_This endeavour, shall we call it, will require no small amount of nerve on both our parts. I need to be sure that you’re a brave person, or this won’t work out, I’m afraid. To this end, I challenge you to go to the adult literature section, and pick out the dirtiest book you can find. I leave the choice to you._

_Second, I need to know that I can trust you. I thought it prudent not to include many personal details in this notebook, but all the same, I would still prefer to rest assured that I will not be ridiculed because of anything written in here. Pick out a book that lets me know that I can have absolute confidence in you._

_Finally, pick any book from any section that you feels best represents you and your life. This one’s entirely up to you, so choose wisely!_

Harley almost laughs as he finishes reading the third page. He doesn’t have time for this. He only has an hour until he has to go to work, and he needs to do at least a little research for his paper in that time. _No distractions_ , he thinks firmly, putting the Moleskine back on the shelf and returning to his pile of textbooks.

He scans the indexes of each book, making a note of the pages which reference the subject of his paper. As he opens each of the pages in turn, however, the words seem to jumble together and rearrange themselves into total gobbledegook. Try as he might, the only thing Harley can think about is that damned Moleskine. Admitting defeat, he lets out an exasperated sigh and returns to the shelf where the red notebook is sitting, exactly as he left it.

He reviews the three books he needs, and feels his cheeks warm at the first instruction. The dirtiest book he can find… Whoever this is, he clearly knows how to make a guy squirm. Not wanting to leave his things behind, Harley shoulders his backpack and tucks his jacket under his arm, before heading into the adult fiction aisle, feeling as though every eye in the library is watching him.

He scans the shelves, cringing at some of the titles. He spots _Fifty Shades of Grey_ , and almost takes it, as it’s the only one he’s heard of, but then he remembers the instruction. The notebook clearly said that its writer is looking for someone brave; he doesn’t really want to immediately blow it by choosing the safest option available to him. No, if he’s going to impress this mysterious writer, he’s going to have to browse. _God, I hope no one sees me,_ he thinks a little desperately.

He considers about a dozen different titles, scanning their descriptions, and flicking through a few pages of the more promising ones. He gags more than once at some of the imagery – _why do they never just say ‘dick’?_ – but eventually finds one entitled _Pulses of Passion_ , which he feels is suitably sickening. He walks out as boldly as he is able, sliding the book under the Moleskine and avoiding the baffled gaze of a passing librarian.

“Well, that was horrifying,” he murmurs to no one in particular, reviewing the notebook’s instructions. A book to show he can be trusted… Well, _that’s_ simple enough, he thinks with no small amount of sarcasm. He starts browsing the general non-fiction shelves, perplexed as to where to even begin. Eventually, though, a title on a lower shelf catches his eye, and he stoops down to examine it.

 _Who Can You Trust?_ asks the cover page in big gold letters. Harley leans against the shelf and scans through it, optimising rising in his chest. The book’s general message seems to be that we trust people every day, even though we don’t know them. We trust that tenants will pay rent; we trust that the postal service will deliver our parcels; we trust artificial intelligence not to sell our secrets to the government.

As far as Harley can tell, the book suggests that although we don’t really know who we can trust, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t trust anyone. He feels that this is a good stance to take, especially since he’s not really sure what the writer of the notebook is looking for.

Satisfied, Harley places the second book on top of the smut and checks the third instruction. A book that represents him and his life… _He doesn’t ask much, does he?_ Harley thinks, a derisive laugh escaping the corners of his mouth.

For this, he doesn’t browse the shelves; instead, he finds a seat in a quiet corner, and mentally goes through every book he’s read, either for school or for entertainment. If this book has to try and represent him, it needs to be one he’s already familiar with.

After fifteen frustrating minutes, nothing has come to mind. He’s absently twisting the hem of his flannel around a finger when it hits him. Amazed that it took him so long to think of it, he hurries to the classic literature section, searching for one title in particular. “Bingo,” he murmurs when he spots it, pulling one of several copies of _Great Expectations_ off the shelf. He allows himself a small, contented smile, before looking at the final instruction on the third page.

_When you have all three books, go to a desk and ask for MJ. She will give you your next instructions. Good luck!_

Now feeling more than a little nervous, Harley approaches one of the information desks. A bored-looking girl with curly black hair is sat behind it, simultaneously reading a thick novel and doodling on a small sketchpad. Harley clears his throat softly, and she looks up.

“Can I help you?” she asks, sounding as enthusiastic as she looks.

“Hi, I’m looking for… MJ?”

Her eyebrows lift in surprise, and she sits up, scrutinising him. He sees her eyes flicker down to the pile of books in his arms, and her eyes widen. “Holy shit,” she breathes, suddenly considerably more animated. “Sorry, it’s just been weeks, I never thought… never mind. I’m MJ,” she finishes.

 _That explains it,_ Harley thinks. _She recognised the notebook._ God, this is mortifying. Out of instinct, his face falls into a subtle scowl.

“Show me the books then,” she says impatiently, holding out a hand.

Clearly she’s prepared for this, but this somehow does not alleviate his embarrassment. He hands them over, and she inspects them, smirking at his choice. She actually laughs out loud when she gets to the adult book, at which point Harley’s ears almost start burning under his hat.

“Okay, here’s what you do next,” she says, suddenly all business. “Read everything on pages four and five, then write something yourself, following all of the rules on page four. Then you put these back,” she continues, passing him the three books, “and bring the notebook back to me.”

“Got it,” he replies, still slightly wishing the ground would swallow him up. “Uh, thanks.”

“No problem,” she says, and he can almost sense her watching him all the way back to the desk. He sits down and pulls a ballpoint pen from his bag, and turns to the next page of the Moleskine.

_Rules for writing:_

  1. _No specific personal details – no names, no addresses, or anything like that._
  2. _Only write two pages at a time at most (my attention span simply will not allow for any more than that!)_
  3. _Always stipulate where I should put the notebook for you to find again, and vice versa._



_(Sorry, I like lists, they help me order my mind. I promise that’s the last one!)_

Harley’s eyes move to the next page, where his new pen-pal has filled the page with his loopy, slightly messy handwriting.

_So, here goes: firstly, if you’re even reading this far, it means MJ approves of you, so you’re okay in my book. Secondly, I tend to get over-excited and babble, which is partly why I put in the one-page rule. Which, incidentally, I’ve already used a quarter of. Damn._

_Anyway, it doesn’t really matter too much, as this is just a sort of opening letter so you can get to know me a little. I’m 15, I live in Queens (but I come into the city quite often for work), and I guess I’m kind of a geek. Science and math are my best subjects: I once met Dr Bruce Banner at an open seminar and cried when he shook my hand. Not my finest hour._

_I don’t know why I told you that._

_Also, as you may have gathered by criterium number 4, I’m bisexual. If you somehow didn’t pick that up, and aren’t comfortable with that, it’s chill, just put the notebook back and make sure to tell MJ the deal’s off. She won’t tell me anything, don’t worry._

_I think that will do for the moment. Make sure to write where you want me to put the notebook next time!_

Harley frowns, already wondering what the boy’s experienced which would make him worry about a potential romantic partner knowing he’s bisexual.

**I’m not really sure where to begin, to be honest, so if you don’t mind I’ll sort of respond to your message, and also try and explain my book choices. I turned 16 a month ago, and I’m from Harlem. I do some robotics in my spare time, but my only experience with famous people is when I saw Samuel L Jackson buying a hotdog in Times Square.**

**Incidentally, it is totally okay that you’re bi. I’m gay, as it happens, although I’m not really out. Actually, you’re the first person I’ve ever told.**

**Regarding the trust book – I guess I wanted to tell you that we can never really know who to trust, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. I also think trust is earned, so I’d like to prove to you that you can trust me. I don’t have enough space to explain fully, but I chose _Great Expectations_ because I like to imagine that my life will someday be something more than it currently is. For a city of 8 million people, New York is a surprisingly lonely place.**

**Leave the notebook in the magazine stand between Platforms 2 and 3 at Grand Central Station, no one ever reads them or replaces them, so it’ll be safe.**

Slightly jittery with the thrill of spilling some of his most closely-guarded secrets to a total stranger, Harley reads and rereads what he’s written, and exhales deeply, content. He turns on his phone to check the time, and realises with some alarm that he only has ten minutes until he has to be at work. “Shit,” he mutters, and hurries back to the information desk, where MJ has clearly been waiting for him. She says nothing as she takes the Moleskine, but nods approvingly, and he offers her an awkward half-smile as he zips up his jacket and steps out into the cold once again.


	3. The Chase - Peter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> MJ dutifully gives Peter his notebook back, but certain events deny him the chance to write in it that night.

When MJ strolls over to him after homeroom on Monday morning, Peter can’t help but feel a little nervous at the triumphant glint in her eye. This usually means he’s in trouble, but as it turns out, not today. Instead, she dips a hand into her backpack and pulls out a wine-red notebook.

“Look, I know it didn’t work,” he says, before she can gloat. “There’s no need to be all, ‘I told you so, nerd’,” he continues, in a passable imitation of her tone.

“Okay,” she shrugs, before turning on her heel and wandering away. Peter watches her go in disbelief, until Ned seemingly materialises beside him, apparently having dragged himself away from Betty Brant’s face.

“She’s in a weird mood today,” he remarks.

“Isn’t she always?” Peter starts to shove the notebook in his bag, annoyed – the least she could have done is left it at the library, in case…

He almost drops it as this thought concludes. _In case someone found it._ What if someone did, and that’s why MJ’s returned it?

But surely not? It’s been more than three weeks since he gave it to her, and he hasn’t even thought about it in days.

“…what’s that, anyways?” Ned’s asking.

“It’s the notebook,” Peter says slowly, and Ned’s eyes basically pop.

“Holy shit! Did someone find it?”

Peter shrugs, almost too nervous to find out. Ned’s reaching for it, but Peter shakes himself out of his reverie and snatches it away, flicking through the first few pages to where he stopped writing.

His heart almost stops when he sees the next page filled in, in a handwriting he doesn’t recognise.

“Well?” Ned urges, bouncing on the balls of his feet in anticipation. Peter nods quickly, afraid somehow that if he acknowledges it aloud, the words will disappear from existence. Ned squeaks excitedly.

“Don’t get too worked up,” Peter says, his mouth suddenly very dry. “It may come to nothing.”

“Go on, read it!”

“No,” Peter says firmly. “Not now, we’re late already.” Ned pouts in disappointment, but Peter stows the Moleskine firmly at the bottom of his bag, zips it up and slings it onto his shoulder. “I’ll read it at lunch, okay?” he says, amused at Ned’s investment in this peculiar arrangement.

“That’s like, three hours away!”

“Well, it’s been three weeks, hasn’t it?” Peter says, in the same kind of tone as a parent telling their four-year-old that ice cream comes _after_ dinner, not before. “A few more hours won’t make a lot of difference.” Ned, true to form, babbles enthusiastically all the way to the locker rooms, about what he thinks Peter’s mysterious new contact might be like. Peter, for his part, hums acknowledgements when he feels like he’s been quiet for too long, to pretend he’s listening.

In truth, he’s trying not to think about what he’s going to find when he opens the notebook again. He doesn’t want to work himself into as excitable a state as Ned, only to find himself disappointed. He wrote his parts in the notebook in a sort of daze, assuming that this was all entirely theoretical anyway, as no one was going to find it.

Now that somebody has, though, it all seems a lot more real, and his misgivings about the idea have come rushing back to him. Yes, he’s aware that he’s prone to overthinking, but Peter also knows he’s pretty useless at keeping secrets, and if he were to let slip something about his “night job”, as he calls it between Ned and MJ, it could be a catastrophe.

The fact is that there are simply too many uncomfortable variables right now, and he doesn’t want to lose his head until he’s had a chance to reason it all out in his mind. And frankly, his Spanish class seems to be the perfect place to do so. He answers his name in the roll call, then allows his mind to drift away from the past imperfect tense, and to start shuffling through all his doubts and concerns.

By the time the bell rings signalling the end of the class, he’s feeling a little more positive about it all: the safeguards he put in place – no names, no specific details, no contact addresses – are enough to ensure anonymity between them. He’s also no longer concerned about being catfished, as he’s been able to use MJ as a filter to confirm that his new correspondent isn’t middle-aged, or anything. All in all, things are looking up.

However, despite Ned’s best efforts and MJ’s poorly-feigned indifference, Peter doesn’t even take the notebook out again until the lunch hour begins. He excuses himself from Ned’s ramblings about the latest trailer for the forthcoming _Star Wars_ movie, and locks himself in one of the bathroom stalls to read.

He scans the pages, covered entirely in an angular printed hand, which obviously belongs to a boy. He was pretty certain of it when he first opened the pages when MJ gave the notebook back, and the words confirm his suspicions. It only takes him a minute to read it all, but it takes him another seven to reread it several times and actually absorb the information.

Peter learns that this boy is about six months older than him, and lives in Manhattan. Judging his instructions of where to leave the notebook next, he clearly knows the city well, too. He learns that he is, at least to some extent, rather lonely, and he smiles sadly when the boy writes about how he wishes his life was different than it is. He’s gay, apparently, and totally okay with Peter being bisexual, which is no small relief.

All thing considered, Peter finds that he’s very content with this introduction. He senses there’s plenty that his new correspondent hasn’t told him, but there’s time. Besides, he does only have two six-by-four-inch pages to write on.

Suddenly aware that he’s been sitting in this one stall for nearly ten minutes, he hastily flushes the unused water away and exits. On his way out, he makes a show of washing his hands, even though he didn’t actually relieve himself, and there’s no one else there to judge him anyway.

Ned’s in the lunch queue when he returns to their table, and he sits down opposite MJ to ask the question that’s been itching at his lips all morning.

“MJ,” he asks, folding his arms and leaning on the table, “what’s he like?”

“I can’t think of the right word,” she says after a moment’s thought. “Also I don’t want to say anything that could be misleading, you know?”

“Okay then, what does he look like?”

She frowns as she tries to recall. “I think his hair was kind of blond,” she says slowly. “And I couldn’t really tell, because he was wearing a hat, but there seemed to be quite a lot of it.”

“How tall is he?” Peter asks apprehensively.

“I mean, I was sitting down,” she says, reasonably, “but no more than a couple of inches taller than you, I’d say.”

Peter ponders this. “Did he seem nice?”

“Look, Peter, I don’t know what to tell you.” An impatient tone has slipped into her voice, most likely because she has now tried and failed four times to take a bite of her untouched sandwich. “I didn’t take a picture of the guy, and he was in my line of sight for no more than a minute, total.”

“Yeah, I know. Sorry, I was just curious.”

“Are you going to write back, then?” she asks through a mouthful of cheese and tomato.

Peter nods. “I just need to figure out what I want to say.”

The truth is there are a million things he wants to say, but with just two pages to write on, trying to narrow it down is easier said than done. Hoping for inspiration, he rereads the message several times on the train home, but nothing comes to mind. Neither does he receive any inspiration over the next few hours, which is taken up by overdue English homework, dinner and a couple of episodes of _Adventure Time_.

It barely seems ten minutes before he’s diving out of the window once again, cursing himself for not making time to write in the Moleskine before going out on patrol. He resolves to return a little early and do it before he goes to bed. It needs to be done tonight, really, as he’s going into the city tomorrow for his “internship”, as he calls it, so it makes sense to drop the notebook at Grand Central on the way.

As usual, Peter swings through various streets around Queens, keeping an eye out for trouble, but also keeping his attention on the police scanner, in case anything comes up that he can help with. Tonight, though, everything seems quiet. With so many cars and pedestrians bustling around during the day, the afternoon’s snow hasn’t settled, and the consequent slush has now frozen. When this happens, the streets are generally fairly empty until the big trucks wind through the street spreading salt on the roads.

With little else to do for the moment, Peter decides to indulge his carefree side, and swings down into the park, where he releases his web-line and slides to a stop on the smooth, dark ice of the frozen pond. “ _Shall I increase your suit’s grip, Peter?_ ” Karen asks, sensing him wobbling on the slippery surface.

“No, we’re good,” Peter says, making his motions more deliberate as he starts across the pond, occasionally making a slingshot off the lamp-posts with his webs to give him a burst of speed.

Growing up, he did quite a lot of figure-skating, and the principle is the same here, even without actual skates. He leans into the turn as he rounds a corner, twisting his feet gently so as not to lose too much speed. He tries a jump at one point, turning his body 180 degrees and allowing himself to slide backwards, unable to suppress a grin as a lone pedestrian spots him, their face contorted in amazed disbelief at Spider-Man casually skating across a pond.

His giddy excitement fades quickly as Karen increases the volume of the police scanner in his earpiece. “ _Ten-sixteen, we have a reported carjacking. Suspect is headed northbound on 164 th, towards Kissena Park. Nearby units, please respond._”

“164th towards the park,” Peter repeats under his breath, zipping to a lamp-post for a better view.

“ _Ten-four, acknowledged. We’re in pursuit._ ”

“Karen, isolate that message,” Peter says sharply, and AI immediately pings up the responding police car on his heads-up display. Sure enough, the familiar blue-shift of a police siren is approaching, and he can see red and blue lights flashing in the distance. “Can we intercept the car?”

“ _Affirmative, but you’ll have to be quick. The suspect will pass us in less than a minute._ ” Peter doesn’t waste a second, leaping off his lamp-post and swinging towards the road that forms the boundary of the park.

“Karen, identify the stolen car.” It flashes up in red as it whizzes underneath the streetlight on which he’s perched. “Shit,” he mutters, immediately starting to swing between lamp-posts, gathering speed with every launch.

Cars on both sides of the road swerve to the sidewalk as the runaway accelerates down the road, with both Peter and three police cars in pursuit. It’s evident that this carjacker is making no attempt to be discreet, and he sounds his horn for a full fifteen seconds as he barrels over the intersection, knocking a cyclist flying.

Peter gasps, and slingshots off an advertising billboard, catching the cyclist seconds before she’s thrown into the main road. He has to set her down slightly unceremoniously to keep his momentum, but she’s alive, at least. He calls out a brief apology as he swings away, landing briefly on the roof of one of the cop cars to catch his breath.

Less than five seconds later, he instinctively ducks to avoid a gunshot. He looks up incredulously, to see an officer leaning out of the car in front and pointing a gun at him.

“You’ve _got_ to be kidding me!” he shouts in protest, but launches off the police car nonetheless, and resumes swinging.  
“ _Spider-Man – stand down!_ ” calls an officer through a loudspeaker. “ _We don’t need you here!_ ”

“You could have fooled me!” Peter yells back, thoroughly annoyed – there’s a maniac driving seventy miles an hour through the streets, but the police are shooting at _him_? He twirls in mid-air, momentarily considering webbing one of their tyres, but reluctantly decides against it, and continues the chase.

At the next intersection, the joyrider throws the car into a right turn, slowing down only slightly on the bend, before speeding away again. He gains a bit of distance from the police, who were clearly expecting him to keep going straight, and they struggle to pull as slick a manoeuvre as the joyrider managed. Peter, however, simply attaches a web-line to a different building and keeps going, losing no distance at all.

“ _Peter_ ,” says Karen, “ _there is a seventy-seven percent chance that the driver will attempt to lose you at the Throg’s Neck bridge._ ”

Peter’s heart sinks at this analysis – the bridge runs over the river for half a mile, connecting Queens to the Bronx. If the driver makes it past the shoreline, there’s no way Peter will be able to follow.

“Then I guess we’ll have to catch him before he gets there,” Peter says grimly. “Stay on him, Karen.”

Sure enough, the driver uses his head-start to make several sharp turns down the smaller streets, before merging with the freeway traffic headed for the bridge. By now, Peter’s having a harder time keeping up: not only is he becoming tired, but the lamp-posts are fewer and further between out here, meaning he has to take bigger swings, occasionally having to spring off individual streetlights for a speed boost.

With these techniques, he’s just about managing to stay close to the runaway car, but he can’t seem to get any closer. Out of nowhere, the road starts to curve upwards into a shallow ramp – meaning they’re at the bridge. Peter spares a glance upwards, and sure enough, they’re rapidly approaching the massive metal arches supporting the south end of the bridge. After these, though, it’s just a long stretch of road over the water, and there will be nothing Peter can do.

“Karen, how long do I have?” he asks desperately, not sure he wants the answer.

“ _Approximately two minutes_ ,” she replies, inappropriately calm. Now or never, then.

“Wings!” he cries, launching off a streetlight and spreading his arms and legs wide.

Right on cue, the thin flaps of material appear between his limbs, and he glides forward on the upward wind from the river. The joyrider slows down slightly so he can weave between a bus and a semi, giving Peter time to overtake him and stick to the metal plating of the suspension arch. The semi, however, presents a problem – he can’t simply stop the car, because he can’t halt the traffic in time to prevent a pile-up. The semi’s hauling a huge fuel tanker, and a collision would trigger an explosion strong enough to rip a hole in the road.

“Think, Peter, think,” he breathes, looking between the oncoming car, the semi and the river. In literally seconds, the car will pass him, and it’ll be too late. “Sorry about this,” he mutters to the car’s original owner, hoping they have insurance.

Leaping off the arch, he shoots a web from each hand to one side of the car and yanks hard on the strings. The webs snag the arch as the car shoots past it, forcing it to swing sharply to the right. It crashes through the protective fence, careering over the edge and into the air.

Peter feels a surge of triumph, but he’s not done yet. He reattaches himself to the arch, before shooting another web through the broken car window with surgical precision. He feels the string connect, and pulls it back, tugging the driver out through the window seconds before the wrecked car hits the water. It floats at the surface for a few moments, before nosediving and disappearing, leaving only a cluster of bubbles in its wake.

The driver, meanwhile, is still dangling on the end of Peter’s web twenty feet from the river, yelling abuse at the top of his lungs. Peter drops carefully down onto the road, where the traffic has now stopped at the commotion. As he’s hauling the man up, he hears approaching sirens, doors slamming, and officers shouting.

“Brilliant,” he mutters, pulling the reckless driver to safety and webbing him securely to the arch.

“You can’t do this!” the man’s shouting. “I have rights! I demand to speak to my attorney!”

“Save it for the cops,” Peter says shortly. Satisfied that he’s secure, he shimmies up the arch, and prepares to jump off, when he’s interrupted.

“Spider-Man!” calls a gruff male voice, and he sighs and looks down.

“Yes, officer?”

“You should have let us handle this,” the officer says, as his colleagues cut through the webbing and handcuff the driver.

“Why, because you were so close to catching him?” Peter says sarcastically, still crouching on the arch, ready to spring.

“What happened to the car?” the officer asks, ignoring the jibe.

“In the river, sorry. Only way I could get him.”

“In the _river_?”

“Look, it was lose the car or lose both,” Peter says, now highly annoyed. At this point, he just wants to go home and go to bed. “If you think I made the wrong choice, feel free to let him go without charging him. I’m sure he’ll be pleased.”

The officer mutters quietly to his colleague for a moment before addressing Peter again. “Okay, Spider-Man, we’re going to need to take you in for questioning over the damage to the bridge.”

“Yeah, no thanks,” Peter says, as casually as if he’s being offered a piece of gum. “Good night, officers. And you’re welcome.”

With these final sardonic words, he leaps off the arch, and uses his mini-wings to glide back to the shore. He lands carefully between two tall office blocks, and disappears.

By the time he gets back, having stopped a backstreet mugging and directed an Italian lady to the nearest taxi company, he’s actually ten minutes past his school-night curfew. Peter braces himself for a fight as he eases the window open, crawling along the ceiling so he doesn’t knock anything off his desk.

Fortunately, though, Aunt May isn’t waiting for him, and he remembers she doesn’t wait up for him when she has a morning shift. He breathes a sigh of relief as he drops catfooted to the floor, before decompressing the suit, hanging it on its peg and climbing up to his bed. He briefly remembers the notebook and lets out a tiny groan of frustration, but he really can’t write in it now. He’s desperate to sleep, and every bone in his body is screaming with fatigue from the chase. In his last few moments awake, he decides it’s a tomorrow problem.

By the time he gets to school in the morning, it seems as if everyone at Midtown Tech is clamouring about a chase between the police, Spider-Man and a reckless joyrider. As it turns out, a news helicopter for ABC7 was in the area, and the entire pursuit was broadcast live. Clips of Spider-Man launching the car into the river and saving the driver are, according to Flash, already pushing thirty thousand views on YouTube.

In the midst of all this chatter, Peter tries to keep a neutral expression, but he’s practically sweating by the time he meets Ned at his locker.

“It was _so_ cool,” Ned says for the sixth time. “Like, you could have stopped the car any time you wanted but, my god, the dramatics? I watched the whole thing live, it was _awesome_!”

“Could you maybe keep your voice down?” Peter hisses.

“I don’t know if you noticed,” Ned says patiently, “but this is _literally_ the only thing anyone’s talking about. No one’s going to notice if we are too!”

“Yes, but they might start noticing if you keep talking about it in the _second person_ ,” he replies through gritted teeth.

“Okay, fair, that’s on me,” Ned says, holding up a hand. “But this still might be the coolest thing _he’s_ ever done,” he adds, putting extra emphasis on the ‘he’.

“He fought Captain America!”

“And lost,” Ned counters. Peter refrains from pointing out that four months ago, that fight was all Ned could talk about for at least a week.

“Okay, whatever,” Peter says, stung. Sure, it was a decent workout, but this is a long way from his most impressive feat – he didn’t even save the car. “And while we’re on the subject, he absolutely could not have stopped it any sooner. In fact, he was fairly convinced that he wasn’t going to manage it at all.” He closes his locker and sees a couple of seniors nearby, who are giving him a funny look. “I mean, that’s what it looked like from the footage,” he adds with a nervous laugh.

Ned rolls his eyes, and changes the subject. “So, d’you write in that notebook yet?”  
“How is it,” Peter asks, now becoming rather annoyed, “that you constantly manage to bring up the topics I _least_ want to talk about?”

“Hey, Parker,” calls the obnoxious voice of Flash Thompson from a few lockers down. “Bet your Spider-Pal has some cool stories about last night.”

“Yeah, he’s a fascinating guy,” Peter shoots back in a monotone. “We actually talked about it over coffee this morning. I’m writing an article for the _Daily Bugle_.”

“Are you really?” Ned asks excitedly.

“Wow,” says Peter, shaking his head forlornly. “Just… wow.”

Grand Central is, as ever, teeming with people bustling between platforms, escalators and kiosks. Announcers call out arrivals and departures over the loudspeakers, along with reminders not to leave luggage unattended, and that bags caught in train car doors cause delays. An angry man shouts at a ticket inspector for doing her job, while the ticket inspector firmly states that she cannot allow him to board the train without a ticket. Elsewhere, a little girl jumps off a train and runs into the open arms of her grandparents. Station security complete their patrols, and scowl at people loitering in front of the destination boards.

Normally, Peter hates such an environment, as his heightened senses make it difficult to even think, let alone carry out a task. And while this is still true today, the sheer number of people means that no one is paying him any attention, which is to his advantage.

As per his correspondent’s instructions, he wanders casually up to the magazine stand between the second and third platforms, and pretends to be looking at an ancient issue of _Fisherman’s Weekly_ , while surreptitiously sliding the notebook between two other newspapers. This done, he takes a few steps away, to make sure the Moleskine can’t be seen. Satisfied, he goes to a vending machine for a small candy bar and heads for the exit, his mission completed.


	4. The Detention - Harley

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After an unpleasant encounter at work, Harley receives a detention, and some unpleasant news.

Dragging his eyes away from the live footage of a police chase on the TV screen on the wall, Harley groans internally as a customer approaches his register: a woman, probably in her mid-forties, with a short strawberry-blonde haircut and sunglasses. He knows he shouldn’t judge by appearances, and he tries not to – but he can generally tell when someone’s going to be trouble. Also, it’s nine-thirty at night; why the hell is she wearing sunglasses?

“Welcome to IHOP, what can I get you this evening?”

He’s so tired that he barely hears the words coming out of his mouth; he also has to ask the customer to repeat herself, but that’s mostly because he can’t believe he heard her correctly.

“Are you stupid or something?” she asks crossly, placing her hands firmly on her hips. “I said I’d like a double pepperoni, a plain cheese, and two sides of curly fries.”

“Ma’am, this is IHOP,” Harley says, momentarily contemplating walking out and lying down in the street. “I’m really sorry, but we don’t serve pizza here. We do have burgers or sandwiches, if you’d like something other than pancakes?”

“But I asked for pizza,” she says, with an infuriating smile which very clearly says, _you’re very lucky I’m not yelling at you right now._

“If it’s pizza you want, ma’am, there’s a well-established pizza joint a little way down the street,” Harley says, but by this point he’s not very interested what she does. He’s just going through the motions until it stops being his responsibility. “If you turn left out of here and – ”

“Young man,” she says, pushing her sunglasses off her face into her hair. She squints at his name badge. “Harry,” she continues, and Harley doesn’t care enough to correct her. “I have asked, twice now, for pizzas. My sons – ” She points to a booth with three surly-looking boys. “ – need their dinner, so I have asked you to place the order. I don’t see what the fucking problem is.”

“The problem is that we don’t have the facilities to make pizza,” Harley says, examining his fingernails and ceasing to make eye contact. “My register also has a pre-set list of items, so even if we could make it, I couldn’t ring it up for you.”

“Well, fuck you then,” she says, pointing angrily at him. Harley’s starting to think he might actually have to deal with this situation himself, when she finally utters the immortal words, “Is there a manager I can speak to?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he replies, suddenly a lot more co-operative. Then, unable to stop himself. “While I fetch her, perhaps you would be willing to explain to those in the line behind you what’s going on.” He doesn’t wait to hear her response before slipping through the swinging door into the staff office, where his manager is on the phone.

“…are you seriously telling me there is nobody scheduled to be on shift that day? How can the timetabling system fuck up that badly?”

“Jenny?”

“Of _course_ I need you to take a look at it.”

“Uh, Jenny?”

“No, sorry, I’m not mad at you. But I can’t open tomorrow without any staff, you know?”

“Jenny,” he hisses again, and at last she glances up.

“Hold on,” she says into the phone, and covers the receiver with one hand. “Yes, hun?”

“There’s a customer outside wanting pizza.”

“Well, what did you tell them?”

“That we’re an IHOP. She asked for a manager. And she cursed at me.”

“For Christ’s sakes,” she mutters, and puts the phone to her ear again. “Martin, I’m going to have to call you back. No, don’t call my cell, I won’t answer.” She hangs up, brushes her hands on her blouse and puts on her customer-service smile. “Come on, let’s get this bitch out of here,” she says briskly, and Harley manages a half-smile. He’s always the first to say he hates his job, but he couldn’t ask for a better supervisor.

“…and that assistant of yours, bless his heart, told me it was going to cost me forty dollars for a special order,” this customer is saying when he joins Jenny at the register. “And I just don’t think that’s an acceptable price.”

“Well, first of all, that’s not what he said happened,” Jenny says patiently, brushing a strand of greying hair out of her eyes. “Second, ma’am, he can’t charge you for an order that isn’t on the register, so what you’re telling me is literally impossible.” The customer closes her mouth abruptly. “Third, as my employee told you, we don’t serve pizza. And on top of all of that,” she goes on, raising her voice to drown out the customer’s attempts to cut in, “you cursed out a minor. I’m going to have to ask you to leave, or I shall call for security to have you escorted off the premises.” To Harley’s immense satisfaction, the customer pales considerably, and hurries out.

“Thanks,” he says quietly, and she pats him gently on the shoulder and returns to the office. He returns to the register, shares an empathetic glance with Emily, the girl on the other register, and clears his throat. “Can I help?”

On the bus home, Harley pulls out his phone to check the news, still interested in the police chase that was on TV during his shift. A quick Google search brings up reports and video clips of a stolen car running rampant through the streets of Queens, until Spider-Man somehow caused the car to spiral out of control and drive off the Throg’s Neck bridge.

Harley plays the footage on a loop, trying to work out how he did it, but the whole thing was filmed from a helicopter, so the picture’s not brilliant. He does admire, though, how Spider-Man still saved the driver, when he could have let him land in the river with the car. Not every superhero would have.

Harley has mixed feelings about superheroes, if he’s honest. He understands that the good they do probably outweighs the bad, but if he’s honest, he does share the misgivings of those who have called for more accountability over the last couple of years. In Harley’s experience, the people who staunchly advocate for superhero immunity didn’t need to be rehoused after the Battle of New York because the Hulk threw a car through their living room wall.

Despite that, he struggles to find much to criticise when it comes to Spider-Man: he generally seems to stay out of things, and despite the people attempting to discredit him, no one really disputes that Queens has a much lower crime rate per capita than anywhere else in the city. In fact, as Harley steps off the bus at the corner of his street, he can’t help feeling he’d feel a little more confident returning home from his shifts if he knew Spider-Man was patrolling the streets.

Abbie’s already in bed when he gets in, so he has to manoeuvre around the bedroom in the dark. Easier said than done, but he’s done it so many times by now that he can practically echolocate. He considers doing his math homework by torchlight, but frankly, he’d rather sleep. He can either do it on the bus, or even better, just take the hit this time. After all, it’s been a while since his last detention, and he has a reputation of mediocrity to uphold.

He pulls off his ugly blue uniform and tugs on an old t-shirt. It could probably do with a wash, but the building only has three washer-dryers to share, and one of them broke down two weeks ago. The landlord hasn’t sent anyone to fix it yet, so they’re only machine-washing essentials (namely underwear, and Harley and his mom’s work uniforms). Harley’s been hand-washing his regular clothes, but in his opinion it’s too much effort to bother with stuff he just wears in bed.

As he climbs into bed and rolls onto one side, gentle snores start emanating from the bed at the other end of the room. Harley groans and pulls his comforter up over his exposed ear. He’s sure she does it on purpose. To distract himself, he sets his mind on the red notebook. Since Friday, he’s wandered down to Grand Central most days to see if it’s been returned, but so far, it hasn’t. He wanted to go today, but he had to go directly to work from robotics club, so he didn’t get the chance. Tomorrow, however, he has nothing after school and no shift, which means he’ll be free to go and look again.

Zach’s also invited him over, but he’s hesitating. In theory, he likes going, and it’s certainly nice to be asked, but he always feels awkward going home with Zach, who lives in this really classy apartment in East Harlem with his rich parents. As in, they actually _own_ this apartment, they don’t rent it, which blows Harley’s mind.

Zach’s parents are very cheerful and friendly, and they always do their best to make him feel welcome, but even so, he can’t help feeling a little out of place there. Then, of course, there’s the fact that he has to take two different bus routes to get home, which is a hassle. Zach always insists that his parents would be happy to drive him home, but that seems worse to Harley, so he doesn’t go over there all that often.

When he gets on the bus the following morning, he decides to play it by ear. He explains this to Zach, who’s perfectly understanding, and consequently, he starts the day with an unusual feeling of contentment. That is, until he walks into his math class, where Mr Anderson is already collecting their homework.

“Mr Keener,” he says sharply, flipping through the sheets of paper and checking it against the list of names on roll. “Anything for me?”

“No,” Harley says, as carelessly as he can.

“That’s twice this trimester, Mr Keener,” his teacher replies with a frown. He puts the homework sheets down on his desk, and scribbles something on a small yellow slip of paper – a detention card, just as Harley predicted. “Take this to Mrs Schultz at the end of the day.”

Harley stands up to take it, ignoring the snicker he hears from the front row on his way back to his seat.

“Bad luck,” Zach hisses from behind him. “Guess that makes your mind up about this afternoon, huh?” Harley nods wordlessly, genuinely unsure whether he’s annoyed or relieved.

The rest of the day, to his surprise, turns out to be considerably better. He scored a B-minus in last week’s chemistry quiz (the perfect grade, in his opinion), doesn’t get picked last for soccer, and manages to sneak a chocolate pudding onto his lunch tray without paying for it. By the time he pushes open the door to the detention hall, he’s in relatively high spirits.

“What was it this time, Mr Keener?” Mrs Schultz says, her tone an interesting blend of disapproval and sympathy. “Homework again?”

He nods and hands over the yellow detention card, and she gestures to the rows of mostly-empty seats. Every time he comes in, Harley wonders why they keep thirty seats in the detention hall: he’s never seen more than seven or eight students in here at any one time.

He takes a look around at his companions: the group of four students huddled together in the far back corner are regulars, who Harley knows for a fact smoke pot behind the bike sheds in the lunch hour. There’s one girl who’s a surprise – Elisabeth Merry, whom he knows from his World History class, and she never puts a toe out of line. Sure enough, she looks thoroughly miserable, and Harley’s intrigued to know what she could have done to end up here.

There’s one other boy he doesn’t recognise, who’s sitting in the back row, spinning a mechanical pencil around his fingers. Harley chooses a seat a few feet away, and slings his backpack under the desk.

“Alright,” Mrs Schultz says briskly. “I think that’s everyone.” The assembled company, Elisabeth Merry excluded, groans collectively as Mrs Schultz pushes the TV stand out to the front of the classroom. “Yes, I know,” she says loudly, “but state law requires that I show you this, and if you didn’t want to watch it, you should have made better choices, shouldn’t you?”

She frowns at the remote for a few seconds, and then the ancient television set blinks to life. Sure enough, Captain America’s familiar blue uniform and helmet fills the screen, sitting down backwards on a chair and seeming to meet everyone’s gaze.

“So,” says the pre-recorded voice, in a tone that’s clearly meant to be parental and understanding, “you got detention. You screwed up, you know what you did was wrong.”

Harley looks around at his companions’ reactions. One of the potheads is lip-syncing with the TV audio; Elisabeth Merry looks as though she’s about to cry; meanwhile, the unknown boy at the back looks utterly uninterested, and is still spinning his pencil. Harley examines him, taking in his undercut, and the mass of bracelets and wristbands on his left arm. The boy catches his eye and grins, and Harley hastily looks away.

“…take it from a guy who’s been frozen for sixty-five years – the only way to really be cool is to follow the rules.”

“Oh, give me a break,” Harley says, in a barely-audible whisper. He briefly checks that Mrs Schultz is absorbed in her novel, and buries his head in his arms on the desk.

The next ninety minutes drag more than Harley thought possible. All he wants to do is get up, walk out and catch a bus to Grand Central to see if the notebook is there, but instead, he has to sit and listen to Captain America harp on about rectifying his behaviour for nearly fifteen minutes.

When the video is done, Mrs Schultz gives them permission to read, draw or catch up on homework to fill the time. Harley doesn’t have anything to read, so he pulls out his physics textbook and starts working through the questions he has to answer for Friday.

At one point, he feels something sharp hit him in the back of the head, and turns around to see a paper dart sitting by his feet. Undercut Boy smiles, and looks pointedly at the dart. Harley turns it over, and there’s a phone number scribbled on the wing. Harley dares not pull out his cell phone, but makes a mental note to ask him about it when they leave.

At five o’clock, Mrs Schultz finally looks up from her book and clears her throat. “Okay, everybody, that’ll do for today.”

They file out in near-silence, with only a couple of the smokers conversing under their breath.

Harley catches up with Undercut Boy, and calls out, “Hey,” as he draws alongside.

“Hey, man,” says Undercut Boy. “What’s up?”

“Um,” says Harley, slightly thrown by the question, as if Undercut Boy didn’t assault him with his phone number earlier. “Nothing, really. I just wondered why you gave me this.” He holds up the paper dart.

“Oh, sure.” He shrugs and smiles effortlessly. “I’m Ryder, by the way.”

“Harley.”

“Well, I just wanted to give you my number,” Ryder says, “and maybe ask if you’d want to, I don’t know, catch a movie sometime.”

Harley takes a moment to process this. “Are… are you asking me out?”

Ryder frowns for the first time. “Is that not okay?”

“No, it’s fine,” Harley says hastily. “I’m just not…” He doesn’t get a chance to finish before Ryder cuts him off.

“Oh, sorry, man.” He looks a little embarrassed. “I guess I just assumed – no worries. Take it easy.”

He claps Harley on the back and hurries away. Harley watches him go, thoroughly confused about what the hell just happened. He was planning on saying that he’s not used to people taking that kind of interest in him, but Ryder was clearly expecting him to say something else.

He’s halfway to Grand Central when it hits him – Ryder must have thought he was going to say that he’s not gay. A strange sense of guilt overtakes him as the massive station building looms into view. Ryder’s intuitions about Harley were absolutely correct, and it isn’t Ryder’s fault that he misunderstood. Then again, neither is it Harley’s fault that Ryder didn’t let him finish, nor that Harley wasn’t especially interested anyway. With all of this in mind, it’s not an understatement to say that Harley’s mind is very mixed-up by the time he jogs up the escalator into the station atrium.

Avoiding eye contact with anyone, he heads to one of the newspaper stands mounted on the wall, and starts rummaging through it. _Fisherman’s Weekly_ , the _Daily Bugle_ , the _New York Times_ – suddenly Harley’s hand hits something hard, and his heart skips a beat. He pulls it out, and sure enough, it’s the notebook, returned to exactly the right place.

Maybe it’s not a practical joke after all.

He discreetly slips it into his backpack, after making sure that the security officers aren’t looking his way, then shoves his hands in his pocket and heads for the ticket vending machine. Since he’s this far into the city, he might as well get the subway home. It only costs a couple of dollars more than the bus, and takes less than half the time.

It’s now well into rush hour, and the subway platform is crowded. Even so, nothing muffles the roar of the train as it speeds alongside, slowing to a stop near the entrance to the far tunnel. Harley manages to squeeze in just before the doors shut, and he leans against them and plants his feet, unable to reach a handhold. He has to steady himself as the train lurches into motion, gathering speed as the station lights disappear, leaving the flickering fluorescents of the subway car as the only light source.

By the time he leaves the train, he’s feeling more than a little nauseous from travelling backwards at such speed, while swaying almost constantly. When he reaches the surface, he has to pause and take a few deep breaths to soothe his stirring insides.

“You’re late,” says his mother as he walks in, by way of greeting.

“I got detention,” Harley says, deeming it prudent not to mention going to the station.

“Why?”

“Someone annoyed me, so I killed them.”

“You’re hilarious,” she says humourlessly, tipping dry pasta into a pan.

“Just missed a piece of homework, that’s all.”

He opens the refrigerator, and his mother tuts. “Don’t eat, we’re about to have dinner!”

“I’m just getting a drink,” he says sharply. He doesn’t really mean to snap at her, although God knows he wants to. It just seems as though she’s on his case about absolutely everything at the moment. He pulls out a carton of orange juice and pours some into a glass.

An uncomfortable silence falls between them for a moment, then she asks, “How was work last night? I was asleep before you got back.”

“Same as usual,” he shrugs, recognising the olive branch and humouring her. “Had one customer come in and ask for pizza, though. That was fun.”

She chuckles. “They asked for pizza at IHOP?”

“Yeah,” he says, leaning back against the counter. “And she cussed me out, so Jenny made her leave.”

“Good,” she replies approvingly. The silence returns, and Harley sips his orange juice as an excuse not to speak again. More and more, lately, he’s finding that they have very little to talk about. He’s saved the trouble of trying to think of something, though, because she asks, “Could you put dishes out?”

“Sure,” he says, relieved not to have to make conversation. After a few minutes, though, he thinks he hears her inhale sharply, and glances over with the distinct impression that she’s working her way up to saying something. “What?”

“Your dad called again today.”

Harley groans inwardly; he wondered if it was that. “Yes, and?”

“Will you really not see him?”

“Why would I want to see him?” Harley asks, slamming knives and forks down on the table with unnecessary force. “I hardly know him!”

“That’s why he wants to see you,” she says patiently. “To get to know you.”

Harley snorts incredulously. “Yeah, ten years too late.”

“Will you at least let me give him your number?”

“Does he want to see Abbie?” he shoots back, and his mother, predictably, has no reply. “Thought not.”

“It’s different.”

Harley lets out a soft, derisive laugh. “How is it different? She’s his daughter, yet he only wants to see me?” When his mother doesn’t answer, he continues. “He’s a complete asshole, mom! He only wants to see me so he can make sure I’m turning into a _man_.” He lowers the pitch of his voice deliberately on this final word. “As if he actually cares how I turn out.”

“He’s trying, Harley.”

“He’s very trying,” he snaps. “Whenever he asks, he only ever suggests baseball games, or NASCAR, or boxing. God _forbid_ he actually ask me what I want to do.” He exhales deeply, now utterly furious, and takes a long drink of his juice to give himself time to calm down. She doesn’t look at him, but focuses on stirring a jar of sauce into the pasta. “Would you give him a second chance to be your husband?”

“No, of course not,” she says quietly.

“Then why should I give him a second chance to be my father?” he reasons, and he sees her nod. “Please don’t ask me again.”

“Okay,” she says, still not looking at him. “Will you go get your sister? Dinner’s almost ready.”

It’s late by the time he actually gets to look at the message in the notebook, and Abbie’s already in bed. He pulls on the headband flashlight that his grandmother gave him at Christmas, and pulls the comforter over him so it doesn’t wake Abbie up.

_I haven’t actually read Great Expectations – I don’t really have a lot of time or patience for classic literature, to be honest, unless I have to read it for school, of course. I generally prefer graphic novels, as they’re shorter and easier to follow. I know what you mean about New York being lonely, though. I always wonder why people never talk to each other, on the subway and stuff._

_I also liked what you said about trusting people. I looked up that book, and you’re right – we trust strangers every day without even thinking about it. And I hope you feel you can trust me, too. Obviously a couple of my friends know about this notebook, but I swear I will never show them anything inside it._

_You mentioned that you’ve never come out before, and honestly? I’m really honoured to be the first. If you don’t mind me asking, is there a reason you haven’t told anyone else, or is it just not the right time? Either way I understand – you never really know how someone’s going to react until you tell them, which can be terrifying._

_I’m also really interested to know what you do for fun. And I’m sorry – I know whenever someone asks what my hobbies are, I’m always like, ‘shit, what do I do with my spare time?’ So don’t stress if it’s difficult to put into words, I was just curious!_

_I really like movies; I’ve said before I’m kind of a nerd, and I stand by that – I’m really into sci-fi and fantasy, and all that. My best friend and I saved for months to go to Comic-Con last year, and it was so worth it. I dressed up as Frodo, and he went as Samwise, you know, from Lord of the Rings. It was a little… makeshift, shall we say, but it was really fun._

_I also love playing board games, but none of my friends are that into it, so I don’t get to play all that often, which is a bummer._

_This time, head to the Natural History Museum, and put the notebook under the foot of one of the figures on the big statue in front of the museum entrance._

Harley reads it through several times, trying with limited success to piece together a mental picture of what the boy in the notebook looks like. He’s not prone to bouts of sentimentality, but he can’t help thinking that his correspondent’s little spiel about Comic-Con was really sweet. He’s seen the first _Lord of the Rings_ film (far too long for his liking), and he can’t help feeling a little envious that he has a friend close enough to co-ordinate a costume.

The next placement of the notebook, however, is going to require a good deal more thought than last time. He hasn’t been to the museum in years, but he knows it’s busy, so it’ll be a challenge to drop off the notebook without being noticed. Still, that’s not a problem for tonight, and he suspects the challenge is why his correspondent has chosen it. He reads the message through once more, then flicks off his flashlight and settles down to sleep with the faintest hint of a smile on his face.


	5. The Explosion - Peter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peter combines his hunt for the notebook with a late-night patrol in Manhattan - and comes to be very glad that he did.

Glancing down onto the platform to ensure no one’s spotted him, Peter springs from his position on the station canopy to the roof of the train, lying flat against the metal plating of the subway car. Once it reaches Manhattan, he’ll have to hold onto the back instead, but this will do while the train is above ground.

He doesn’t do this often. Actually, he rarely even goes into Manhattan as Spider-Man at all, but least of all like this. Money’s a little tight this week, though, as Aunt May caught the flu, so couldn’t go into work, so he’s having to cut back on a few things, including unnecessary train journeys. Tonight, however, he wants to find the notebook, write in it and put it in its new location on the same night, and he has a hunch that he’ll find it on the statue as requested. The train starts moving with a hiss of its hydraulics, and Peter sets his grip firmly.

It’s been a weird week, he reflects as the train gathers speed. After the car chase fiasco, he’s had to keep his head down a little bit when on patrol, once again taking up the role of ‘friendly neighbourhood superhero’, rather than ‘watchful neighbourhood vigilante’. To this end, he’s started doing his patrols immediately after school before going home to do homework, instead of the other way around.

So far this week, he’s directed an Italian couple to the nearest hotel, prevented a three-way vehicle collision, helped a preschool field trip to cross the road, rescued two cats from a tree in the park (separate incidents of different cats in the same tree, which struck him as odd), and cheerfully advised a young man to stop trying to pick the lock of a chained-up bicycle.

Aunt May’s said in no uncertain terms that she prefers this anyway, as it generally puts him in less danger. He’s assured her, however, that this is only a temporary measure to allow the police to cool off a little after the bridge incident. After all, he’s fairly certain that they would arrest him for the damage to the bridge if they were given the opportunity, so he has simply not given them the chance to even try.

The night after the chase, he watched from a safe distance as a group of divers took a floating crane out onto the river to retrieve the sunken car. His conscience was already clear, though, as the car’s owner gave an interview on the morning news, and confirmed that her insurance would, in fact, cover the damage.

He shivers involuntarily: the wind is picking up as they approach the river, and the track starts to slope downwards. He crawls swiftly to the rear of the train, and nestles himself in the emergency doorway into the cab, shielding him from the wind and protecting him from the walls of the subway tunnel. Sure enough, a fierce _whooshing_ rushes around his ears as the train is plunged into darkness, and Karen helpfully muffles the audio receptors in his mask, reducing the severity of the sound.

Not wanting to step off the back of the train at a station, Peter waits until he sees a service hatch connecting the tunnel to the street, then flicks out a web and zips to the ladder. He pops his head through the hatch at street level, and drops down again as a small truck rumbles overhead. He’ll have to be quick if he’s to avoid being run down.

With one fluid motion, he pushes the hatch cover off, springs into the air, and with a well-timed web shot, he twitches the hatch cover back into place, before swinging away down the street towards the park, where the Natural History Museum awaits, hopefully, with its prize.

Crouching in a tree on the edge of the road, his lenses zoom in on the statue, searching for the notebook. He’s left it a few days to give his correspondent time to respond, so he’s hoping it’s here: it would be very irritating to have to come back on another night. Sure enough, though, he spots it, and flicks a web-line to it, tugging it from its position and pulling it back to him.

It’s been wrapped neatly in a clean grocery bag, a prudent precaution considering the near-constant snowfalls from the last few days. Peter eagerly unwraps it, dropping the bag into a garbage can and nestling in a convenient fork in the tree’s branches to read its contents.

**Honestly, I am the type of person you’re talking about – I feel weird if I even make eye contact with a stranger on the subway. But yeah, I realise it’s kind of messed up. My mom’s parents live in rural Tennessee, and when we go to see them, literally everyone in the town knows us just by association with them. You’re right, it is weird how different it is here.**

**And actually, I do trust you. I’m actually a little surprised at how much, since trusting people isn’t really my strong suit. I guess there’s safety in anonymity, and it’s different getting to know you from the inside out, almost. There’s none of the usual judgement of appearances like when you meet someone in real life for the first time. But yeah, there’s no one in my life I would even tell about this notebook, so rest assured that your secrets are safe.**

**I guess that’s also why I haven’t come out, because there’s no one I feel comfortable telling. Which, if I may say so, is total bullshit – I get to hear all about the love lives of my straight classmates like it’s no big deal, but if I were to do that, it would be this whole thing of me ‘coming out’ to the world. Like… coming out is absolutely for straight people. When it comes to it, I’m just going to introduce my first boyfriend to my mom and be like, “yeah, he’s mine,” and be done with it. No hassle, no big scene. As far as I’m concerned, it’s not a big deal.**

**Anyway, rant over, I guess. As for what I do for fun… shit, I don’t really know. Between school and homework and my job, I don’t get a whole lot of free time. I like reading, as you’ve probably gathered, and I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m part of my school’s robotics club. But I’d always be down for a game of something if / when we eventually start meeting in person.**

**I’m afraid I don’t watch a lot of TV, or movies for that matter – but that doesn’t mean I’m not willing to try. I _have_ seen the first _Lord of the Rings_ but I can’t say I enjoyed it much (I am now very scared)..!**

**There’s an unlocked community display case on a wall opposite Avengers Tower where you can leave the book. Incidentally, what do you think of the Avengers, and all that?**

A certain sense of relief comes over Peter as he reads through the message – when he first started this, one serious concern was that he would have nothing at all in common, and therefore have nothing to talk about. However, this message proves that although their interests don’t altogether line up, there’s some commonality, and it seems this boy – whoever he is – could be persuaded to try new things, and Peter’s certainly willing to as well.

He lets out a nervous laugh at the final sentence. How can he _possibly_ summarise – truthfully – his feelings about the Avengers, when three months ago he was literally offered the chance to become one? How can he express his thoughts on superheroes when he goes out most evenings to stop crime, dressed in spandex designed for him by Tony Stark himself? It’ll take more than a little thought to respond to this question.

As for leaving the notebook _across the street_ from the building where he spends two afternoons a week working on his equipment – well, that’s bordering on poetic. For the briefest of moments, Peter wonders if his correspondent has guessed, then shakes off this notion – there’s nothing he’s said that could have given it away. He’s probably just curious about Peter’s opinion on the topic, and chose Avengers Tower because it’s such a prominent landmark.

Settled comfortably in the forked tree branch, Peter pulls a pen out of the small storage compartment in his suit, where he keeps his phone, a spare packet of his emergency anxiety medication and occasionally a granola bar, if he’s had to skip a meal. He’s given up asking Tony how it is he can fit stuff into it without any of it showing through the suit, as he’s never got a straight answer. He turns the page and starts writing in the glow of a nearby streetlight, flipping back and forth between the pages when he can’t remember what the other boy wrote.

It’s quiet tonight, he notices at one point, glancing up from the Moleskine at the near-empty street in front of the museum. This thought keeps coming back to him, because it strikes him as suspicious. Realistically, there’s no reason it should, but… he just can’t shake the feeling that the city is winding up for a sucker punch, no matter how absurd this notion seems.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he mutters aloud, as he scans his writing for errors and closes the notebook. “It’s only because it’s cold, and everyone’s at home watching the new episode of _Game of Thrones_.”

He chuckles at his own paranoia as he leaps out of the tree, having reassured himself. He swings across Central Park, humming snippets of an AC/DC song between breaths. A group of young men flags him down to ask for directions to Times Square, but besides that, he reaches Avengers Tower without incident, pretending to be merely examining the noticeboard as he slides the notebook in behind a Broadway poster.

Peter gazes up at the enormous tower, dominating the skyline, and has a sudden, wild idea – never in his life has he gone all the way up it, so he throws his inhibitions to the wind and sprints towards it, launching himself into the air and twisting his body to plant his feet on the exterior wall. Absently hoping that he’s not about to trip any security alarms, he breaks into a run, sporadically using his webs to slingshot himself a little way up the building. The wind rushes around his mask, and his heart pounds in his chest – sticky powers or not, running against gravity is one hell of a workout.

Before long, he's squinting as he approaches the enormous neon sign, its single crimson letter shining out over New York. It passes under his feet like a flash and he jumps, tumbling through the air and landing gracefully on one of the two brick spires that mark the top of the building, two red lights blinking to warn away passing aircraft.

He crouches down, breathing deeply and trying to calm his racing heart. He gazes out, and a soft _whoa_ is carried away by the wind, as he realises how high up he is. The highest point in the city, he marvels, gazing down at the cars scurrying like ants between the identical blocks of buildings below, and the park sprawling out in front of him, impossibly big and dark.

Up here, it’s nearly silent. No vehicle engines, no intermittent sirens, no angry drivers, no horns, no chatter. Just Peter, the wind, and the occasional thrum of a passing airplane, until –

_Boom._

His heightened senses nearly jolting him off the building, Peter’s head twists automatically right, where what looks like half of a building has just exploded into the street half a mile away. Without a moment of hesitation, he springs into the air, falling enough to give him time to accelerate, before activating his under-arm wings with a shout.

“Karen, what’s going on?” he calls over the wind, pushing him forward into an effortless glide north.

“ _Unclear_ ,” is the response. Unusually, she sounds concerned. “ _We are not yet close enough to be sure, but judging the size of the blast, I estimate a gas leak in the affected building._ ”

“Call the cops,” Peter says. “Actually, all the emergency services.” Smoke is pouring from a street in east Harlem, and he hears panicked screams as he draws nearer.

Once he’s low enough, he tilts his arms, making a hairpin turn towards the building. A quick glance tells him everything he needs to know: rubble is strewn across the road, and there are bodies lying motionless in the street. He aches to check if they’re alright, but there are already people with them. He can’t help them, and there could be others still in the building whom he can still save. He folds in his limbs as he approaches a window on the fifth and highest floor, shutting his eyes as he breaks through the wooden panes with a crunch.

“Karen, filter out the methane in the air,” he says with a cough, retching as he tastes the gas.

“ _Activating the ‘just breathe’ protocol_ ,” she replies. All at once, he can breathe again, and he inhales sharply.

“Hello?” he calls, as loudly as he’s able. “Is anyone here? Talk to me!”

“Over here!” cries a voice some distance away. “Help me!”

“Keep talking!” he shouts, before adding more quietly, “Karen, isolate life signs on this floor and the one below.” It’s an elderly woman’s voice, he can hear that now, and Karen’s marked her on his heads-up display. He weaves his way through the wreckage, doing his best not to disturb anything that might further compromise the building’s structural integrity. “I’m coming, keep talking!”

“I’m over here!” she calls weakly. “I can’t stand!”

He tentatively pushes open a door into what was clearly once a kitchen. “Let me help you up,” he says, forcing his voice to be calm and trying to draw her attention from the flames licking the wooden surface of her countertop. It seems to be working, because she clasps his hand and eases herself to her feet, wincing with pain. “Come on,” he says, “it’ll be easier if I carry you. Do you mind?” She shakes her head, and he gently eases her onto his shoulder in a fireman’s lift.

“My cat,” she says desperately. Peter swears under his breath, but quickly spots the poor creature, cowering under a collapsed table, yowling with terror. With no time for ceremony or decorum, he flings out a sticky net with his web-shooters, catches the cat in it and passes it to her, before extending a long web-line to lower them both to the ground from the broken window.

This done, he proceeds to the fourth floor, then the third. By the time he reaches the second, the fire department have extended a ladder to the windows, but one of the firefighters calls to Peter, and he drops to the ground.

“Spider-Man,” she says, her face lined with concern. “We’re evacuating the residents on the second floor, but the rubble is blocking our path into the restaurant.”

“How many are in there?”

“We’re not sure,” she says, passing a small hatchet to her colleague from the toolkit she’s holding. “But we think at least three.”

“I’m on it,” he says briskly, jogging to the enormous pile of concrete and brick covering most of the front wall.

He wonders momentarily if it was something in the restaurant that set off the blast, but no matter. He spots a tiny hole near the top of the wreckage, and crawls to it, squeezing through the gap. Even for him, it’s a tight fit, and he has to wiggle his shoulders quite significantly to pull himself through.

“Hello? Is there anyone here?” he calls, and almost immediately, someone replies, “We’re in the office!” Peter vaulted over the counter, ignoring the impulse to pinch a couple of notes from the registers, the contents of which were strewn across the linoleum floor. He eases the door open, to see four figures – two about his age, two older – huddled together under some tables. Impressed at their common sense, he beckons them out, helping the older two back over the counter.

“Now what?” asks the young woman desperately, gesturing around them, and Peter frowns. He didn’t think this far ahead.

“Go to the far left window,” he instructs them, and points out the hole he crawled through.

“You can’t be serious,” says the older man, folding his arms across his ample torso.

“Have you got a better idea?” Peter demands. He climbs up the wall of rubble, and pushes a few stones out of the way, widening the gap considerably. “You three first,” he says to the two women and the young man, putting his hands together to help them up to the hole in the wreckage. Finally, he gestures to the larger man, suppressing a grunt of exertion as he lifts him up. Suddenly, though, the man stops moving. “Go!” Peter shouts, as a fluorescent light crashes to the floor nearby. “The building could come down any second!”

“I can’t!” the man shouts back, and Peter realises, with some trepidation, that he’s stuck.

“Goddamnit,” he groans, pinching the bridge of his nose in frustration.

The young man calls down, “We’re going to pull, okay?”

Trying desperately to ignore the clear sounds of the building’s core structure groaning around them, Peter dutifully seizes the older man’s shoes and pushes with all his strength. With one final effort, Peter feels him moving forward, clear of the building. He springs through the gap, hoping that his temper isn’t obvious through his mask. The two women are on their way down to the ground, and a couple of firefighters are assisting the man. The young man, however, has fallen back against the rubble with exhaustion.

“Come on,” Peter says, offering him his hand to help him up. The young man takes it, and follows Peter back down to street level. “Are you hurt?” Peter asks, and he shakes his head.

“Just… shaken, I guess.” There’s a pause as they walk slowly to one of the ambulances, where his colleagues are being treated. Peter glances at him, and realises that he can’t be much older than him. Poor kid. “Are you okay?” the boy adds.

Peter almost laughs – this boy just spent nearly an hour trapped in a crumbling building, and yet is asking Spider-Man if he’s alright. “I’m fine,” Peter says sincerely, genuinely touched by his thoughtfulness. As far as he can remember, no one he’s ever saved has ever asked about his own wellbeing. The paramedics swarm the boy before either of them can say anything else, and with an affirmative from Karen, Peter takes his cue, flicking a web to the streetlight and vanishing into the night.

When Peter arrives at the Tower the next day, Tony’s waiting for him in the lobby, his hands in his pocket and an accusing expression on his face. Peter feels his heart sink, but maintains a nonchalant expression as they step into the elevator together.

“I heard Spider-Man was out and about in Manhattan last night,” Tony remarks eventually.

“Did you?” Peter says lightly, and Tony raises an eyebrow.

“What were you doing all the way out here?”

“Saving, like, fifteen people,” Peter retorts, “and a cat,” he adds, slightly feebly. Tony cracks a sceptical smile.

“Right, so when you left home last night,” he says, nodding as if this now all makes sense, “you knew that the gas tank in that particular building had a leak, so decided to come out and wait for it to blow.” Tony nods sagely. “Seems awfully suspicious to me, Parker.”

“Oh, come on,” Peter says with a reproving tut. “Of course I didn’t know that was going to happen, but would you rather I wasn’t there last night?”

“I didn’t say that,” Tony replies loftily.

“So what’s your point?”

“What happened to ‘friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man’? You know, the whole reason you turned down becoming an Avenger?”

“Okay,” Peter sighs, “the real reason I was in Manhattan last night was because I was looking for the notebook.” The _ding_ of the elevator bell breaks the ensuing silence.

“What?”

“You know,” Peter says, uncomfortably shifting his weight to the other foot. “The notebook you gave me. The red one.”

“No shit,” Tony replies, an entirely different tone to his voice. Is he… impressed? “That actually worked?”

“You didn’t think it would, then?”

“You keep putting words in my mouth, kid,” Tony says with a mournful sigh. “But no, I didn’t really think it would work.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m glad it did, though,” he adds, placing a hand on Peter’s shoulder and squeezing gently as they walk into the lab. “What are they like?”

“Hard to say,” Peter says thoughtfully. “I mean, it’s been going on for less than two weeks. But he seems nice. Lonely, I think, and a bit sad.”

“Like your good self,” Tony says with a smirk, and Peter fakes a scowl in his direction. “No, I’m glad it’s working out. And you’re being careful?”

“Perfectly,” Peter reassures him. The lab falls quiet, until Peter pipes up, “So that’s what it was last night? A faulty gas tank?”

“According to the papers,” Tony says, nodding at one on a workbench by the door. Momentarily abandoning his task, Peter crosses the room and glances at the headline. “Then again, they also think you caused it, so maybe don’t pay too much attention.”

“What?” Peter splutters, unfolding the newspaper and scanning the first article.

_A leak in the building’s primary gas tank has been named as the cause for the massive explosion which left six dead and many more injured in Lexington Avenue last night. However, multiple eyewitnesses report that Spider-Man was on the scene almost instantaneously, apparently to assist with the evacuation of the building._

_However, certain individuals are left wondering why Spider-Man did nothing to help those lying helpless in the street, opting instead to crash through several floors of the unstable building in pursuit of survivors. Why, also, was Spider-Man even in Manhattan, when he is known for operating only in Queens?_

_Many analysts have concluded that it was, in fact, Spider-Man who staged the explosion as a publicity stunt to demonstrate his heroism, a claim supported by a source which informs us that Spider-Man was recently rejected as an applicant to the so-called Avengers Initiative…_

At this point, Peter stops reading, throws down the paper in disgust and stares at Tony. “Are you seeing this? Every wanted poster in the city’s going to have my mask on it if this keeps up!”

“Oh, relax,” Tony says with a chuckle, tucking a pencil behind his ear. “No one reads the _Daily Bugle_ these days, let alone takes any notice of what that moron Jameson says.”

“Still,” Peter grumbles, slumping down in the seat at his workbench. “It doesn’t exactly help the feeling towards superheroes, does it?”

Tony hums an affirmative, and apparently keen to change the subject, says, “Oh, by the way, your aunt texted. She’s working late, so you’re having dinner here with me and Pep.”

Peter nods his understanding, his mind still on the news article, really hoping that Tony’s right, and that last night’s events haven’t undone all the good he’s tried to do since discovering his powers.


	6. The Incident - Harley

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After a nasty incident at work, Harley finds himself suddenly without a job and getting a lot more unwanted attention, from several sources.

“Time, people!” Jenny’s clear voice rings out through the restaurant floor as the last few customers file out. Harley rolls up one final bag of a to-go order and hands it over with as believable a smile as he can muster. He’s thoroughly worn out, and the prospect of leaving for school in less than ten hours is not an appealing one. “Can someone do the doors before we get any after-hours?” Jenny says, looking between Harley and Emily.

“I’ll do it,” Harley says, as Emily’s still counting notes into her register. He dodges through the kitchen, where there’s a swinging door that separates the staff area from the seating, and Jenny tosses him the keys from the office door. He hastily inserts one and turns it, sliding the bolts up at the top of the double doors.

As he’s securing the lower bolts, an irritable-looking man appears in his field of vision and raps sharply on the door, and Harley shakes his head firmly and steps away. Despite this obvious response, the man knocks again, and Harley pointedly turns the sign from ‘open’ to ‘closed’. As he walks away, the man sticks up his middle finger at Harley, who smiles cheerfully back at him, and chances a wave when Jenny’s not looking.

He hears a gentle laugh from somewhere behind him, and spins around to see Emily biting her lip as she sweeps food waste and discarded napkins into a long-handled dustpan.

“Just in time,” he remarks as the man returns for one final, hopeful look.

“People can be so entitled,” she says, arching an eyebrow. “What I’d give to have that much confidence.” Harley’s phone buzzes in his pocket, and he rolls his eyes at it. “Everything okay?” she asks, her tone suggesting that she’s interested, but trying not to pry.

“It’s just my mom,” he mutters, shoving his phone back into his pocket and flipping a couple of chairs upside-down on the tables. “Wants me to talk to my dad.”

“Trouble at home?” she says with feeling.

“None at all, but only because he’s not been there for years.”

“Hm, I feel that,” she says, her eyes widening. “My life’s always easier when my dad’s away on his business trips.” She puts extra emphasis on these final two words, making air quotes with her fingers. “They may actually be for business, I don’t care, I just know he hooks up with his secretary from the moment they get on the plane.”

“Ew,” Harley says, wrinkling his nose.

“Tell me about it,” she replies, then pauses. “If you don’t mind me asking… why is your dad texting you if he left? If my dad had the balls to leave, he’d never contact us again.”

“He says he wants to meet me,” Harley says sardonically. “Which is a bit rich, since he shows less than no interest in my sister.”

“Wow, that’s… fucked up.” She grimaces as she processes this. “Sorry, dude.”

He shrugs. “It is what it is. Besides, it doesn’t really bother me anymore. Thanks, though.” He flips the last chair over, then brushes his hands on his apron. “I’ll go start the routine checks.”

There are certain protocols one of them has to follow before they go home for the night – making sure only the emergency power is on, checking the gas readings to make sure they haven’t used too much, ensuring the faucets in the bathroom aren’t dripping, that sort of thing. He checks the bathrooms first, then heads out into the office. He stoops down to a low cupboard and frowns at the gas meter reading.

“Jenny?” She’s at her desk, and she looks up from her paperwork, possibly sensing the concern in her voice.

“What is it, hun?”

“Can you check I’m reading this right?”

She brushes off her skirt as she stands, crouching down beside him and peering over her glasses at the reading. “But that’s way too high.”

“It’s wrong, right?” Harley says cautiously. “It has to be, we can’t have used that much g– ”

The end of his sentence is cut off by a sound resembling a cannon blast in one of the floors above them, and the walls shake as though they’re made of rubber.

“Oh my god,” Jenny breathes, fumbling on her desk for her cell phone. “Harley, get out, now.”

He can hear shouts from the rooms next door, and bursts through. Dave, one of the line cooks, is calling for help from the kitchen, and Emily’s curled up in a corner of the room, her face covered. Glass and plaster dust are littered across the newly-swept floor, the windows apparently having been blown out by the explosion.

“Em, get out!” he hollers across the counter.

“How?” she shouts back, lowering her hands to reveal her terrified expression. He looks to the doors; they could get out, certainly, but it’s practically raining bricks and chunks of drywall, and as he’s looking, a piece of the fire escape crashes to the ground in front of them. There’s no way they’d make it out alive.

He curses under his breath and runs into the kitchen, where Dave is blasting a fire extinguisher into one of the ovens. Harley stoops to the other line cook, slumped on the floor by the door. His hands trembling, he presses two fingers to the man’s neck – nothing.

“What happened?” Harley yells over the noise from outside.

“It wasn’t me!” he blusters, tossing the extinguisher aside. “It came from upstairs!”

“Come on,” he calls, struggling to keep his voice calm. “We need to get somewhere safer.” He grabs Emily’s hand as she appears at the door, and pulls her into the office with Dave in close pursuit. “The fire escape’s through here,” he says as they rejoin Jenny in the office.

“No use,” she says desperately. “I don’t know if the door’s shifted, or what, but I can’t get it open.”

“I’ll try,” Dave says grimly, heading out of the other end of the office towards the emergency exit. They hear a dull _thud_ and a muffled cry of pain, and then Dave reappears, rubbing his shoulder.

“Did you call for help?” Harley asks, and Jenny closes her eyes and shakes her head.

“No reception; the blast must have knocked out a… a transformer, or something, I don’t know.”

“Me neither,” Emily says, pulling her phone out of the pocket of her apron and looking at it in despair.

“Under the desks,” Jenny orders them. “Emily, Harley, go under mine. It’s sturdier, so you’ll be safer if something falls on it. We’ll take the spare one.” Harley and Emily both started to protest this act of gallantry, but Jenny silenced them and pointed under her heavy desk.

Obediently, they crawl underneath and curl up in the tight space, and Harley’s hand finds Emily’s out of sheer terror. From the other side of the office door, they can hear muffled sirens and screams from outside, and occasionally the building shakes, prompting small items to drop onto the floor, making them jump. To Harley’s left, he can hear Jenny and Dave muttering the Lord’s prayer to themselves, and he joins in with the bits he knows, just in case someone’s listening.

After what seems like hours, Harley hears someone call out from the room next door, “Hello? Is there anyone here?”

“We’re in the office!” Harley shouts, relief flooding his chest. Emily squeezes his hand and he offers her a brave smile in return. The door opens almost cautiously, and a familiar figure in red and blue crawls in front of the desk.

“Come on,” Spider-Man says urgently, jumping up and holding the door open. “Let’s get you out of here.” They hesitate only a moment before obeying, spilling out into the restaurant’s main room.

It’s a mess, honestly – tables and chairs are strewn everywhere, shards of glass cover the floor and water is pouring out of a hole in the ceiling, presumably from a burst mains pipe. Spider-Man ushers them all through, gestures to Harley and Emily to climb over the counter, then helps Jenny and Dave do the same.

“Now what?” Emily demands, out of fear rather than anger, and it’s a fair question. By now, the front façade is completely covered with rubble and furniture that’s fallen from the building. The lights have also gone out, leaving them in near darkness. Spider-Man has a flashlight shining from his mask, just next to his eyes, but all the same, Harley has the vague impression that the web-slinging superhero is doing some very quick thinking.

“Go to the far left window,” he orders, pointing his light where he wants them to go. Suddenly Harley realises his plan, as he spots a tiny crack of light from the streetlamps outside, streaming through a hole in the wreckage. But there’s a problem.

“You can’t be serious,” Dave says in disbelief, folding his arms defiantly.

“Have you got a better idea?” Spider-Man asks furiously. He climbs up and pushes a few stones away, and the outside light increases. “You three first,” he says, crouching down and putting his hands together as a foothold. Harley nods at Emily, who clambers up with Spider-Man’s help, before wriggling through the gap. Harley pulls off his apron to improve his manoeuvrability, before following her, blinking at the streetlights as he emerges into the cold night air. He’s reasonably slim, so he has little trouble, but he’s concerned about Dave, who isn’t. Jenny appears next, and he and Emily take an arm each and help her through.

“Are you alright?” she asks, and Harley and Emily both nod. Dave’s head appears through the hole, followed by his arms and shoulders, and the three of them seize hold of him to help him, but there’s nothing doing.

Harley can’t quite work out what Spider-Man is shouting to them, but Dave shouts irritably, “I can’t!”

“We’re going to pull, okay?” Harley calls, hoping the masked man heard him.

Emily lets out a small scream as another brick lands beside her, and Harley realises they’re running out of time. A few firefighters come alongside to assist in the effort as they start hauling, with so much combined strength that Harley’s sure they’re going to pull Dave’s arms out of their sockets. Suddenly, though, there’s give. They keep pulling, and Dave sprawls across the wreckage, his face flushed. Harley, utterly exhausted, collapses down onto the bricks as Emily helps Jenny down to street level.

Spider-Man bounces up through the gap and offers him his hand. “Come on,” he says, a lot more quietly than he was inside. Harley accepts the help gratefully, and Spider-Man throws an arm around his shoulder to support him as they make their way towards the nearest ambulance. “Are you hurt?” Spider-Man asks, and Harley shakes his head no.

“Just… shaken, I guess.” He pauses, his breaths coming in short, sharp bursts. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Spider-Man says, and Harley wonders if that’s true. They didn’t have time to save the other line cook; how many others has Spider-Man had to leave behind tonight? Harley can’t imagine what that feeling would do to a person.

Harley doesn’t get a chance to say anything else to him before he’s surrounded by paramedics, throwing blankets over his shoulder, offering him sweet tea for shock, and asking about his blood type. When he looks back to where they got separated, Spider-Man has already disappeared.

When the EMTs finally let him go, he’s so tired he can hardly stand. The friendly firefighters offer him a lift home, but he politely declines, opting instead to wander to the end of the closed road and find a bus. As he gets onto the bus and hands over the fare, the driver eyes the scratches and bruises on him warily.

“You okay, son?” he asks, concerned, and Harley nods, unwilling to explain the events of the evening to a stranger. He’ll hear about it in the news tomorrow anyway.

His phone, suspiciously silent until now, vibrates in his pocket, and he reaches into his pocket for it. Apparently it’s still functioning, at least, although he’s fairly sure it’s got a few scratches that weren’t there earlier. Any relief he’s feeling, though, vanishes as he sees that it’s an unknown number. He reaches for the red button, then hesitates, and swipes the green button with a resigned sigh.

“Hello?” he asks cautiously.

“ _Hey, Harley_ ,” says a voice Harley doesn’t recognise, although clearly they know him.

“Who is this?”

“ _It’s me, Harley,_ ” says the voice. “ _It’s your dad._ ” Immediately Harley pulls the phone away from his ear. His thumb is millimetres from disconnecting the call when he hears the grainy voice say, “ _Wait!_ ”

“What?” Harley hisses into the phone, absolutely furious. He could very reasonably have died tonight, and he’s nauseated by the sudden thought that the only person who’s contacted him since is his useless, deadbeat father. “What do you want?”

“ _I just want to see you,_ ” his father insists. “ _I asked your mom to give you my number, but you never called_ _._ ”

“Yeah, take the hint, perhaps,” Harley says bitterly.

“ _Would you just hear me out?_ ”

Harley covers his microphone with a trembling hand and exhales deeply, as though there’s a monster in his chest that’s stirring restlessly as it wakes. “Fine. You’ve got until I get off the bus.”

“ _I should never have left,_ ” says the voice quietly. “ _I’ve regretted it every day since._ ”

“Then why didn’t you come back?” Harley says, struggling to keep his temper. “And how come you only ever want to see me?”

“ _I didn’t come back because I was afraid of the hurt I’d caused,_ ” he replies, and Harley almost laughs at the sheer absurdity of the situation. He feels like he’s living in a sitcom. “ _And… I guess I figured Abbie would be more likely to want to see me if I had your approval first._ ”

Harley snorts, and says, “Really.” It’s not a question.

“ _I mean it,_ ” he insists, but Harley’s heard enough.

“The thing is,” he says as the bus pulls to a standstill, “I just don’t care. I don’t care about you, and I don’t care if you’ve changed, or whatever.” He offers the driver a half-hearted wave of thanks as he steps out onto the sidewalk. “I don’t even care if you’re telling the truth, even though you’re probably not. And the thing is, you don’t really care about me either. If you did, you’d have spent the last six months asking me whether I _wanted_ to go to a baseball game or whatever, and you’d have tried sooner, instead of waiting a whole fucking decade.”

“ _Will you just –_ ”

“No,” Harley says flatly. “I won’t. If you want to do something for me for a change, don’t call me again. Good night, _Dad_.” He practically spits this final word and hangs up, shoving his phone back into his pocket. Zach’s messaged him while he was on the call, having seen the news reports, and he taps out a quick message to let him know he’s alright, grateful to know that someone, at least, cares whether he lives or dies.

By the time he’s climbing the stairs to their apartment, he’s pretty sure he’s winding up for a fight. He turns his key in the lock, and the monster in his chest growls as Harley sees his mother frowning at her cell phone at the kitchen table.

“Hi,” she says. She looks tired, but smiles at him. Clearly she hasn’t heard about the restaurant: she doesn’t really keep track of the news, and they don’t generally communicate while he’s at work. However, there’s only one way his dad could have contacted him.

“I told you not to give him my number,” he says roughly, and she grimaces.

“He called you, then?”

“Why did you tell him? We talked about this.”

“Honey, keep your voice down,” she urges him. “Abbie’s in bed.”

“No I won’t,” he snaps, growing louder as the creature in his chest snarls in anger. “Do you have _any_ idea what I’ve been through tonight?” He seizes one of the kitchen chairs so hard that his knuckles turn white. “I could have died in _several_ different ways tonight, and as if that wasn’t enough, I definitely don’t have a job anymore. And on top of all that, I then had to talk to _the one person_ I told you not to let contact me?” He’s properly shouting now, giving no thought to their neighbours, or Abbie, or the horror-struck expression on his mother’s face. “Do you care about me _at all?_ ”

“Harley, of course I do,” she says, standing up from the table and crossing over to him. She reaches for his hand but he snatches it back and turns away from her. “What happened to you? What happened to your face?”

“Look at the news,” he says harshly, walking towards the bedroom to see Abbie peeping through the door. “Move,” he mutters, and she climbs back onto her bed to let him in. He’s aware that there’s a graze on his chin, a shallow cut running the length of his cheekbone, but he hasn’t the energy to treat either. Instead, he crawls into bed fully dressed, curls up into a ball and pulls the covers up above his head to block out the glow of the streetlights outside.

The next day turns out to be just as much of a headache as the last: predictably, everyone’s heard about the blast, as the building is only a few blocks from their school. Harley tries to keep his head down in the hopes that he doesn’t have to relive the experience for people’s entertainment, but he can’t hind the scrapes and bruises on his face and arms, and people quickly manage to put two and two together.

After that, it’s an endless onslaught of “What happened?” and “Were you okay?” and “Is it true Spider-Man caused the explosion?” until Harley’s heartily sick of talking about it. It’s not all bad, though: Dr Patel, Harley’s biology teacher, sharply tells people to leave him alone. Later, in his English class, when a girl asks if he saw anyone dead, Mr Johnson, doesn’t even give him detention for her to fuck off.

To Harley’s immense frustration, very little improves over the course of the week. It comes as no surprise when he receives a text a few days later, informing him that his job will not be transferred to another location, and that his employment is terminated. He receives a cheque for his unpaid wages, as well as some severance as compensation.

He swiftly decides to replace his cell phone – for the first time in nearly five years – with a newer model, before his mother finds out about the bonus. The ‘new’ phone has been out for a few years at this point, but the device itself is new, and it was reasonably priced. All the same, he makes a point not to let her find out before she has to.

By the time school finishes on Friday, he’s so tired he can hardly stand, but he still decides to go to Avengers Tower to see if the notebook is there. He glances around, then opens the display case slightly. Presumably it’s been jostled by the wind, because the notebook slides out from behind a poster and drops to the ground. Harley hastily picks it up, before someone kicks it into a puddle, or worse, the road.

It’s drizzling lightly, so he crosses the street and takes shelter under the canopy of the Avengers Tower’s main entrance as he opens up the Moleskine. He momentarily hesitates, wondering if his correspondent can see him, but shakes the thought off. In all likelihood, the other boy dropped the notebook off well before now, and is long gone. As he flicks through the pages and spots the familiar handwriting, he smiles for the first time in days.

_It’s okay that you’re unsociable, I can forgive that. And that’s cool that you have family out of state; do you get to see them a lot? And whatever the answer, is that a good thing?! I’ve only ever lived in some part of New York, really, and I don’t get to travel a lot – although I did go to Germany a couple of years ago, which was neat, I guess._

_It’s also completely fine that you’re not out, and if this works out, I’m okay with keeping things on the down-low if that would make you more comfortable. That said, I do like the idea of just turning up at your flat and you introducing me as your boyfriend. That’s a hell of a power move, and I dig it._

_You do robotics? That’s so cool! I do a bit of that as well, although more as a hobby with random parts I find; my main extra-curricular at school is academic decathlon, and that takes up a lot of my time. I also work part-time at an internship, and homework, so… yeah, come to think of it, I don’t get that much leisure time either. By the way, if you don’t like LOTR, you should be a) very scared and b) fully prepared to marathon the whole nine hours with me at some point in the future, maybe broken up by a bad rom-com. Speaking of which, any wild Valentine’s Day plans?_

_As for the Avengers… I don’t know, really. I had to write a paper on it for Social Studies and it’s a mess, obviously. Superheroes absolutely need to be held accountable when they screw up, and to make sure that they don’t do more harm than good – Sokovia was arguably forgivable, but that incident in Nigeria last year was a political nightmare._

_At the same time, the government is basically useless at deciding what’s good for a country, so I don’t think they should be trusted with the responsibility for mobilising heroes either. It’s tricky. Also I don’t want to say too much if you want me to leave this across the street from Avengers Tower!_

_This time, I’m sending you on more of a… reverse scavenger hunt, if you will (because my insufferable friends are waaaaay too invested in this, and want to be involved). Pick a recognisable New York landmark and leave the notebook somewhere nearby for me to find. Then, take a picture of the location, and text it to the number at the bottom of the page. It’s not mine, so don’t try calling it!_

Harley closes the notebook and taps it against his other hand thoughtfully. This boy’s interesting, certainly: he says he’s not especially well-travelled (which isn’t an issue, neither is Harley), yet he’s been out of America, and is clearly informed enough to understand properly the controversy of the Sokovia Accords.

In fact, Harley thinks with a frown, even though he says he wrote a paper on the subject, this boy must also have some sort of vested interest in the politics of the situation. After all, most people Harley’s age that he knows couldn’t even have located Nigeria on a map, let alone name-dropped it whilst talking about an event that happened nearly a year prior.

So he’s a bit political, which Harley likes, and by the look of it, doesn’t think much of the sitting government, which makes a refreshing change from his southern relatives, and his mother who does and says nothing to contradict them.

Harley also likes that they seem to have stopped talking about _if_ they’re going to meet, and started referring to the event as _when_. He feels a slight thrill in his chest at the prospect of seeing him for the first time, and the feeling of his arms wrapping tightly around him (Harley senses he’s the hugging type).

A flicker of a daydream flashes through his mind, and he imagines what it would be like to kiss him for the first time. Unusually, though, he doesn’t squash the image down, but lets it linger in his mind’s eye for a few moments as he slips the notebook into his backpack. He hasn’t let himself think like this before, but if he’s being honest, Harley’s finding that he likes the boy in this notebook more and more with every message he sends.


	7. Interlude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As we're more or less halfway through the story, we look at the series of messages Peter and Harley exchange in the notebook over the passing weeks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just for reference, in case it's not obvious - Peter's words are in italics, and Harley's are in bold.

**I hope you find this, and that my clue wasn’t too cryptic! If not… well, I’ll be looking in the newspaper stand behind the Chrysler building for quite some time.**

**It’s been… a week. I probably shouldn’t give you any explicit details for the sake of anonymity, but suffice to say I don’t have a job anymore, which is… kind of a problem, actually. They’ve said they’ll give me a good reference, but it’s still not easy to find decent work as a high school student who can only take evening shifts.**

**I also had this big fight with my mom, because she gave my cell number to my dad when I told her not to. I haven’t mentioned this before now, but he left when I was 5, and never came back. Over the last year or so, though, he’s been trying to get in contact with me (but not my sister). He claims he’s changed and that he wants to get to know me, but I don’t really believe him, and even if I did, I don’t want to get to know him. As far as I’m concerned, he had his chance to be a dad, and he blew it. I’ve never asked – what are your parents like?**

**Also I’m not unsociable! I just… like my own space and enjoy my own company. As for rom-coms – yeah, no, REALLY not my thing. My mom forced me to watch _Notting Hill_ a few years ago and it was the dullest two hours of my life. I’m not even kidding. I’m up for new experiences, but there’s a limit to how far I’ll go!**

**Also, you really know your shit about the whole Avengers thing; I’m way less informed, but I was 12 when aliens invaded New York, and my apartment was ripped apart as a direct result of the Avengers’ intervention. Obviously I’m not saying they should have let us be invaded, but I feel like people don’t often think about their impact on civilians. Like you said, there needs to be some accountability.**

**Leave the notebook taped to a bench near Madison Square Fountain, in a grocery bag in case it rains.**

* * *

_I found it! Obviously, or I wouldn’t be writing this. Forget I said anything. I’m sorry you’ve had such a rough week – that’s a lot of stuff to go wrong in just a few days. I’m also sorry there’s nothing I can do to make it better. But you seem pretty capable, so I’m sure you’ll find a new job in no time._

_As for your dad, that’s an awful thing to have to try and deal with, and kind of a dick move on your mom’s part. Has he contacted you at all since, or has he taken the hint? Regarding my parents… don’t feel guilty for asking, because there’s no way you could have known, but they actually died when I was 8, in the attack on the Stark Expo. These days I live with my aunt, and we do okay. We have occasional fights, but for the most part we get along fine._

_Looks like we’ve both been on the receiving end of superhero collateral damage, huh? To be fair, my one wasn’t Tony Stark’s fault, and he did actually save me at the time, but I take your point._

_Also, I absolutely do not accept that rom-coms are not your thing. I firmly believe a good (or not) rom-com can be anyone’s thing a) in the right circumstances and b) if it’s the right film. To that end… I have reason to believe that especially for Valentine’s Day, the movie theatre on West 42 nd is running an event of the greatest romantic comedies of all time across the weekend, and I’m pretty sure the tickets are pretty cheap._

_I dare you to go to see at least one (I’d recommend_ Love Actually _or_ 10 Things I Hate About You _), and leave the notebook underneath one of the cardboard cutouts promoting the new releases. Go on Saturday if you can, because I’m going with a couple of my friends on the Sunday and I’ll be able to retrieve the notebook then. Let me know what you think! I feel like you’ll be pleasantly surprised._

* * *

**Happy Valentine’s Day! Of course, the entire thing is fuelled by capitalism and corporate greed, but I’m not a cynic all the time.**

**I did it, as you will no doubt have deduced by finding the notebook where you asked. As much as it pains me to say it, I liked it more than I thought I would. I dragged my best (and possibly only) friend along for the ride, which he thought was hilarious, and we saw the double-bill of _10 Things_ and _Music and Lyrics_. **

**_10 Things_ ** **was fun, and I quite like Shakespeare, so I appreciated it. _Music and Lyrics_ , on the other hand, was the single worst film I have ever seen, and I hate how much I enjoyed it. I really do. Given a bit more time, I MAY be willing to concede that you might have been right. (Incidentally, I’m writing this in the bathroom immediately after the showing, and Zach is humming that stupid ‘Pop’ song in the stall next to me.)**

**HOWEVER, if I’m willing to try something new, I think you should have to as well, so here’s my dare for you. Pick your least favourite genre of movie (judging what I know about you, I’m guessing horror), and watch one of the more famous ones. If you go with horror, try _The Shining_ or _A Quiet Place_ , if you want something a bit more modern.**

**Moving back to a more serious topic… whoa. I know you said not to feel bad, but I’m sorry for asking about your parents. As someone who is not part of a “traditional” family – nor who plans to have one, as a gay boy – I shouldn’t have assumed that you were. That wasn’t cool.**

**Meanwhile, my mom and I are back on speaking terms, and I’ve submitted my résumé to at least 15 different stores and restaurants in the area, so I guess we’ll wait and see if any of them call me. I suppose you could say things are looking up.**

**Also I like that I have someone now who I can just talk to. I said before there’s no one in my life I could comfortably come out to, but the truth is there’s no one I can even be this honest about anything with.**

**Tricky one for you, but I think you’ll manage: head to Le Bernardin restaurant and leave the notebook on the shelf of the concierge’s standing desk.**

* * *

_I’m not going to say I told you so, but… I told you so. And excuse me,_ Music and Lyrics _is an absolute masterpiece of a movie, and as someone who finds both Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore insanely attractive, I will not hear a word against it, thank you very much._

 _And you’re absolutely right, I HATE horror movies – my friends dragged me to the theatre to see_ IT _when it came out, and I literally didn’t sleep for two days. I’m assuming you’ve seen it, so that scene where the blood comes gushing out of the sink made me physically nauseous. However, if you can make sacrifices, so can I, although if I fall asleep in class because I’ve been up all night, I shall be holding you responsible._

_Thank you for apologising, although it wouldn’t have bothered me if you hadn’t. As I said, there was no way you could have known, and it was bound to come up eventually. Like you and your dad, it’s not that I’m over it, because I don’t think you ever can be – but I’m in a place where I’ve accepted it, and I’m… used to it, now, I suppose._

_I’m pleased that things seem to be working out better for you, and that you can talk to me. I’m also quite a secretive person at heart, so I know the sensation of feeling like you can’t discuss stuff with people. And it’s a relief to know I’m not the only one who gets so excited when I find the book!_

_My best friend keeps bugging me to let me read what I’m writing – normally I’m able to do this in peace but he broke up with his girlfriend for the third time today. I’m fully aware that they’ll be back together again within the week, but it does mean he’s a bit clingy at the moment. Incidentally, I resent your implication that this Zach person is your only friend._

_Head to Times Square and find the golden man on the unicycle. He’s a friend of mine, and he’ll look after the notebook until I can next pick it up._

* * *

**Okay, I have several questi** **ons. How the hell does someone befriend a street performer? I’ve seen him before, he literally never interacts with the public, he just cycles around the square. I don’t think I’ve ever even heard him speak. And what did you do, just waltz up and say “hey, can you hold a notebook until my sort-of boyfriend comes to pick it up? By the way, I don’t actually know his name or what he looks like”, and he was like, “Sure, toss it in the collection box”?? I am… so confused.**

**Also, Hugh Grant? Really? Anyway, I regret asking you to leave the notebook at that restaurant, because the concierge thought I was stealing his accounts book, and threatened to call the cops until I showed him it was just a journal, which a friend had planted as a prank. My bad.**

**I had a fight with my mom again last night, because I got detention again. I was having a bad day so I just… didn’t go to school. I did all my homework and got Zach to hand it in for me, but I wandered around looking for vacant jobs in the area. She went off on this long rant about how I need to put more effort into my education, even though I’m passing all my classes. I don’t really see what the big deal is, to be honest.**

**She has, at least, stopped trying to persuade me to see my dad. I have to say, it’s a relief. He keeps calling, but I recognise the number now and I’ve stopped answering. I kind of feel bad, because I know my sister wants to meet him, whereas I have the chance and don’t want to. I’ve told her she’s better off without him, but she says she’d rather make that decision herself, which I guess I can understand.**

**I look forward to hearing what you think of whatever movie you choose. Incidentally, I didn’t think _IT_ was all that scary, to be honest. The bit where the clown comes out of the projector screen was actually the only bit that unnerved me, the rest of the “scary” stuff was generally just a bit gross. I actually laughed at the scene where the bully kills his father… but maybe that says more about me than the movie. Moving on.**

**I sincerely wish I could witness your reaction to what I’m about to tell you, but here goes: I watched _Legally Blonde_ the other night. Voluntarily. Again, it pains me to admit it, but it might have been the most fun I’ve ever had.**

**Oh, I almost forgot – I got an interview! I won’t tell you where, in case you happen to visit, but it’s the same kind of work I was doing before, so I’ve got experience. Which, considering all the applicants will be our age, is a serious advantage.**

**Next to the south-eastern emergency exit to Madison Square Garden, there’s a containment unit for a fire extinguisher. Leave the notebook inside.**

* * *

_Oh, it’s a long story, but once someone stole his collection box, so basically I chased them and got it back. When I write it like that it seems really heroic, but to be honest, it was pretty easy – the thief didn’t exactly take a lot of persuading to give it back! Also the term “sort-of boyfriend” made me laugh. I like it, though. I have to admit, I’ve started thinking of you the same way._

_Honestly, don’t worry about it. I get detention like three times a month, and they haven’t kicked me out (yet). My mentor gave me pretty much the same speech at one point last year. I say mentor… he runs the internship I work for, and he’s like a mix between my boss and a weird uncle. He’s a decent guy, although I have to say I wouldn’t complain if he actually started paying me. Actually, now that I think of it, it was him who gave me the idea for the notebook, although he’s admitted since that he didn’t really think it would work!_

_I’m writing this at 4am, because I finished watching_ The Shining _about six hours ago, and I did NOT like it. And now I can’t sleep, so thanks a lot. MJ’s coming over later to watch_ Alien _, which I always thought was just sci-fi. She likes horror movies, though, so she approves of this… education. As for your own movie education, I apologise that you didn’t get to witness the response in real-time, but just know that I had to suppress a very genuine squeal of excitement. I love that movie, and I’m so happy that you liked it too._

_Congratulations on your interview! It’s probably a good thing that you haven’t told me where the job is, because at this point, I don’t think I’d be able to resist the temptation to come and meet you in real life. I hope that doesn’t sound weird and stalker-ish. It’s also not completely true, because the idea of meeting you still kind of terrifies me, as much as I’d like to put a face to the anonymous figure I keep imagining myself kissing._

_Why the hell did I write this in pen? That is not something I actually planned on writing. Ahem._

_Head to FAO Schwarz at the Rockefeller Centre, and leave the notebook under the giant toy panda on display in the window._

* * *

**You stopped a robber?? Okay, when you describe it like that, it makes me wonder if I’m actually talking with Spider-Man. Obviously I’m joking – although how crazy would that be? That’s a weird concept, isn’t it, the idea of dating a superhero? I mean, everyone fantasises about dating celebrities, but that’s, like, a whole other level. Imagine being able to tell people, “My boyfriend saved the world!” Although not with Spider-Man, obviously, because no one really knows who he is. You know what I mean.**

**Yeah, internships aren’t known for being very well-paid, but that’s a bummer all the same. Kudos to this guy for the notebook idea though, it was a stroke of genius.**

**I’m sorry you were so traumatised by the horror movies! I guess it’s easy to laugh at them if you’re a cynical bastard (like me), so in a way, I’m glad they had such an impact on you, because it means you’re… I don’t know, sweet and pure of heart. That said, I didn’t need to traumatise you with Stephen King to work that out. As compensation, you may dare me to anything you like, if you wish, and I shall not complain. Doesn’t even have to be any more shitty movies. (I watched _Love Actually_ , by the way. Dreadful.)**

**See, you shouldn’t really have said that, because now I’ll just be scrutinising every guy our age who comes in to work out if it’s you. Well, I won’t really, because I had the interview and didn’t get the job, but you take my point. That was disappointing, actually, but there’ll be something else. Eventually.**

**So… this is something I’ve been putting off asking, but I suppose it has to come up at some point: have you ~~had a boyfriend~~ been in a relationship before? (Sorry, briefly forgot you can like girls too!) I haven’t, obviously, as it would have been difficult to date other guys when I’d never told anyone (before you) that I’m gay..! Obviously there is no right or wrong answer here, I’m genuinely just curious. And while we’re on the topic of curiosity, I must admit that I imagine kissing you quite often, too.**

**I feel it’s also worth mentioning that I'm going to get some very funny looks as a 16-year-old strolling casually into the stuffed animals department at FAO Schwarz, so thanks for that. Ordinarily I would get you to do something equally humiliating to hide the notebook, but I still feel bad about the horror movies, so I’ll go easy on you. Hide the notebook in the box of brochures in the Belvedere Castle Observatory in Central Park.**

* * *

_Yeah, I can’t imagine dating a celebrity, to be honest – unless it turns out that you’re a famous actor or something, in which case I think I could get on board with it! As for Spider-Man, there must be SOMEONE who knows who he is, surely? But I appreciate what you’re saying, it’s not like Iron Man or someone who publicly admitted their secret identity._

_Anything I like, hmm? Such power… I suppose I should probably wield it responsibly. Okay, how about this: you scared the hell out of me, so I dare you sign up for one of the free post-grad classes at Empire State University, and sit in the front row. See how scary that is! And_ Love Actually _is not dreadful! Just… an acquired taste._

_I’m sorry you didn’t get the job, but as you say, there’ll be something else out there for you. And trust me, I’m already doing the same thing whenever I walk into a coffee shop or small store in Manhattan (not that I do that often). I don’t think I’ve seen you, though – the only barista that even made me wonder was well after you told me you’d lost your job, so it couldn’t have been. It does leave me wondering, though, and I like the idea of searching for you in a city as big and busy as New York. Clearly I watch too many romantic movies._

_To answer your question… not really. I took a girl to homecoming in the fall, but that was nothing short of a disaster (not least because it turned out her dad was a thief, murderer and arms dealer), and it never went anywhere. Apart from that, nothing, so if you happen to be feeling a little insecure about never having dated – please don’t, because I haven’t either, really! And you’re making me blush, stop it._

_I should hope you got funny looks in the toy store, after what you put me through! I won't seek revenge though - this time._ _After your class, leave the notebook in the window-box by the student entrance (it’s covered, but still outside, so I’d recommend a return to the trusty grocery bag)._

* * *

**For the record, I’m not any kind of actor, let alone a famous one. I can play a few chords on the guitar, but that’s the extent of my artistic abilities. I’m more of a practical guy. And sure, someone probably knows Spider-Man’s identity, but yeah, I just mean he’s not public about it.**

**I took your dare, and signed up for a class on nanotechnology at ESU (I’m writing this in the student café). To say it was confusing would be one hell of an understatement. As per your instructions, I sat in the front row, but the professor caught on pretty fast that I didn’t really understand, so she only called on me a couple of times, thankfully! As it went on, I think I started to get it a little, but… yeah, I won’t be doing that again..!**

**I had a couple more interviews, and I’m still waiting to hear back from the second one. I think I have a good chance at this one, but I guess time will tell. And stop looking for me! I know New York is massive, but I found this notebook, which shows that nothing is impossible.**

**Sorry that date was such a disaster – my family might be pretty mediocre, but I can promise that they’re not felons! I actually really appreciate the reassurance, because I was feeling a little concerned that you’d have more experience with dating than me. And once again I chose a lousy drop point - the old lady at the front desk made me pay** **$8 for a brochure, when she saw me trying to get the notebook back. So you're definitely buying the coffee on our first proper date** **, by way of compensation.**

**Another serious question: I know it’s a couple years away for both of us, but do you know what you want to do after you graduate? I think I’d like to go to college – maybe MIT if I can push myself to get the grades. I’ve heard it’s the best one for robotics and programming and that sort of thing. Other times, I wonder if spending four years studying something would just ruin my interest in it, and maybe I should just try to find a job. I know I have time to make up my mind, I just wish I was one of those people who knows exactly what I want and how to get there.**

**Leave the notebook in the potted azalea outside the canoe rental shack in Central Park.**

* * *

_Okay, the revelation that you can play the guitar even a little has me WEAK, I think I just died a little inside (I am very aware that I am a walking, talking cliché)._

_Ooh, nanotechnology, cool subject! I watched a TEDtalk on that not too long ago, and it’s fascinating. It could completely revolutionise shipping processes – imagine how much time, money and fuel could be saved by transporting an entire continent’s shipments of cars, for example, by fitting them with nanotech and putting them on an airplane, it’s crazy!_

_Also if every car was fitted with it, it would completely eliminate the need for big parking lots, which could be converted into condos to fix the housing crisis. Absolutely the future, although from what the talk was saying, it’ll only be the richest people who have access to it at first. Such is life._

_Exciting about your interviews too – make sure to let me know how that goes in your next message! I’m very relieved to hear that you’re not in a crime family – although that is also what you would tell me if you were in one, so now I don’t know what to think._

_As for plans after high school… gosh, I’m really not sure. I think I’m in a similar position to you, to be honest. Part of me wants to go to college and learn stuff and get the university experience, but part of me wonders if that’s just what everyone thinks I should do because I’m, like, good at science and stuff. I think I’ll probably go in the end, but probably not somewhere quite as prestigious as MIT or Harvard. Besides, my mentor graduated from MIT so it would probably give him a stroke if I ended up at Harvard._

_Please forgive me for this next challenge / notebook drop. So, here’s the thing: I’ve mentioned before that my friends are embarrassingly invested in our funny little relationship._

_Separately from this unfortunate fact, I don’t know about you, but I am also reaching the point where I am becoming increasingly curious about you and what you’re like in real life. You’ve met MJ, of course, but my other best friend Ned is constantly griping that MJ got to meet you and he didn’t. He has been pestering me for literal weeks to engineer an excuse to meet you._

_I tried and failed to dissuade him, I really did, and if you want to initiate an equally awkward scenario for me in return, I completely understand and will not complain. Therefore, here is your next dare: arrive at the Hard Rock Café on March 3 rd at 10am, where they will be waiting for you to have coffee, and receive the notebook from you. I apologise again, and also in advance for anything they might say to you..!_


	8. The Café - Harley

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harley heads to the Hard Rock Café, to meet MJ and Ned, hoping to learn a little more about the mysterious boy he's been communicating with.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Go watch Dash and Lily on Netflix, everybody. It's based on the book from which I took the premise for this story, so if you're enjoying this, you'll like that too. Incidentally, Harley (in my head) looks almost exactly like the actor they cast for Dash. It's also really diverse, the characters are really well fleshed-out, and it's overall a very good adaptation of the book.
> 
> If Netflix want to sponsor me I'm totally okay with that. God knows I could use the money.

“So, that’s four Pepsis, two double pepperonis, a plain cheese, and a side order of fries?” Harley says, reading his hastily scribbled notes. The customer nods, and a smirk twitches at the corner of Harley’s mouth. He’s almost certain that the woman, whose sour-looking family is currently sat before him, is the same one who bad-mouthed him at his last job some time ago for not making pizza at a breakfast restaurant. He silently thanks his luck that she hasn’t tried to order pancakes here. “Perfect, is there anything else I can get you today?”

“No, that’s it,” she says loftily. “Have I seen you before?” she adds, an edge of suspicion in her voice.

“I doubt it, ma’am,” he replies, not quite truthfully. “I only started this week.” She hums an affirmative and he taps his notepad with his pen. “If that’s everything, then, I’ll go get your drinks started for you.”

All things considered, it’s somewhat of a step down from his last job: the pay’s a little less, the hours are generally later, and because it’s not fast food, in-house orders have to be taken at the tables, instead of the customers coming to a counter. Not to mention the fact that the other servers with whom he shares his shifts have all been here for some time, and are at least a few years older than him. As such, it seems to Harley that they view him as rather an outsider.

He misses Jenny and Emily; sure, he was working for a corporate machine, but at least he liked the people he worked with. This, incidentally, is more than can be said for Aidan, the other server who’s working tonight, who scowls at Harley at every available opportunity. It’s as though he thinks that Harley is a personal obstacle to his promotion. As far as Harley’s concerned, once he’s not spending every night unloading and drying dishes, he doesn’t care if he never gets promoted.

_Oh well_ , he thinks as he presses a button to fill the glasses up with soda, _beggars can’t be choosers._ Almost literally, in this case. On the other hand, it’s a family-run joint in east Harlem, and considering its size, it’s surprisingly popular. Besides, the owners were so friendly at his interview, and they were the first ones to contact him offering him a job. With this in mind, he accepted on the spot, with a private plan to keep searching in the hope of finding something a little better. 

At this particular moment, though, Harley still has two hours left before his shift ends, and his feet are starting to hurt from walking all around the restaurant. It’s his first time taking orders, as he’s just been washing dishes for the last few days. Over the last two days, however, three of the four servers have come down with the flu, leaving the restaurant vastly understaffed, so Harley’s had to step up. Privately, Harley’s wondered how hygienic they were being if they’ve managed to pass it onto each other, but that’s none of his business.

He smoothly brings the obnoxious family’s drinks to them with a respectful nod of his head, before tucking the tray under his arm and making a beeline for the next table, who have just sat down.

When the dinner rush dies down, Harley steps out into the alley for a moment of peace, drinking in the cool night air – and a cloud of cigarette smoke. He stifles a cough, and Aidan glances over, before turning his head to exhale.

“Sorry about that,” he says gruffly, to Harley’s surprise.

“It’s fine.”

“You need a light?”

“No, I don’t smoke,” Harley says, and Aidan raises an eyebrow.

“You want to try?”

“I’m sixteen,” Harley says with an incredulous laugh.

“I started when I was fourteen,” Aidan says, looking ruefully down at the one in his hand. “Never too young, if you ask me.”

“If you say so,” Harley replies, leaning back against the ancient brickwork and pulling his phone from the pocket of his apron. They lapse into silence, neither really knowing what to say to the other. It occurs to Harley that after five days of working here, this is the closest he’s come to a civil conversation with one of the other staff. As he hits _send_ on a text to Zach, he wonders how much that’s his fault. “You guys don’t like me very much, do you?” he asks before he can stop himself.

Aidan looks at him curiously. “It’s not that we dislike you,” he shrugs. “But it’s always odd when someone new comes, especially since we really liked Loreia, the girl whose job you took.”

“I get that,” Harley says, unable to suppress a shiver as a gust of wind rushes through the alley.

“Also, I washed dishes for four months before I started serving,” he continues, “and you start after four days. It’s competitive, I guess.”

Harley snorts. “It’s only the circumstances.”

“Maybe.” Aidan flicks the cigarette butt onto the ground and grinds it into the asphalt with the heel of his shoe. “Maybe.” On this enigmatic note, he opens the door and gestures Harley through, as Mr Romano, one of the owners, bellows through the kitchen for a server.

* * *

Harley groans as the first rays of sunlight stream through the cracks in the blinds covering his bedroom window, rolling over and covering his face with his pillow. In his considered opinion, it’s far too early to be awake, especially since it’s a Saturday, and he didn’t return home until nearly midnight. The fact that he once again has a job to go to might be an improvement, but all the same, it’s a relief to think that he doesn’t have another shift until tomorrow night.

Now, though, he yawns and tugs his t-shirt down, it having bunched halfway up his chest in the night. As if he wasn’t already late enough to bed, he then found he couldn’t sleep for thinking about what was happening tomorrow.

His eyes shoot open as he remembers, and he emerges from under his pillow. It’s Saturday, March 3rd, and he’s meeting his correspondent’s friends in – he seizes his phone – a little under an hour. Shit. He already showered before he went to bed, but he pulls some clean clothes from the closet and tugs on a beanie to hide his incorrigible bed-hair. After all, these people are absolutely going to go back to his correspondent and report their experience, so he wants to make a good impression.

His mom is drinking coffee at the kitchen table as he hurries in and swipes an apple from the bowl.

“You’re in a good mood,” she remarks, and he doesn’t even contradict her, because for once, she’s right: despite his tiredness,he’s in surprisingly high spirits. He just knows that today is the closest he’ll have been to meeting his mysterious correspondent, and this prospect has lifted his mood considerably.

Instead, he just shrugs, and asks, “Aren’t you working today?”

She shakes her head and sips her coffee. “Abbie’s got her recital this afternoon, and I knew you had plans, and homework, so I’m taking her.”

He chews slowly and swallows, digesting this information. “You took a day off because you didn’t want to bother me?”

“I do _try_ not to be a monster, Harley,” she remarks, shooting him an amused look. “Besides, you’ve had a rough few weeks, with… you know, everything.”

“I… thanks,” he finishes a little lamely, vaguely wondering if she often does things like this. Is he really so self-absorbed that he would never have noticed? He looks away from her, suddenly ashamed, and mumbles, “Sorry I’ve been so…” He tails off, but she smiles.

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I have to go,” he says, reaching for his shoulder bag, where he’s safely stashed the notebook to give to his two coffee companions. “Tell Abbie I said good luck.”

“She won’t believe me unless you say it yourself,” she replies drily, and Harley smiles.

“I’ll text her, then. See you later.”

Harley squints as an early spring breeze pushes the clouds away from the morning sun, throwing Manhattan into broad, warm light. He dips into the pocket of his bomber jacket for his sunglasses as he makes his way towards Times Square, where the notebook boy’s friends await him. Until now, he’s been feeling fairly relaxed about the affair, but he’s suddenly feeling more nervous – what if they don’t like him? What if they go back to the boy and tell him that Harley’s a total asshole? What if, even after all this time, a camera crew shows up and informs him it’s all some big hoax?

He exhales deeply as he rounds a corner, and the massive billboards and screens of Times Square loom into view, screaming their commercials for products, new movies and shows, and events across the city. Harley allows himself a nervous smile as he spots the Hard Rock Café, settling his shoulder bag slightly more comfortably, with the precious notebook inside.

At a far table, Harley recognises a curly-haired girl as MJ, to whom he gave the notebook nearly two months ago. How strange; it seems so much longer. She waves him over, and the boy next to her bounces in his seat with excitement. Feeling a little self-conscious, he pulls off his beanie and makes a feeble attempt to flatten his unkempt hair.

“You’re late,” MJ says drily as he takes the unoccupied seat. He frowns and glances at the clock on the wall, but she grins and adds, “Just kidding. I’m MJ.”

“And I’m Ned,” the boy pipes up. “Just in case you’re wondering, I’m not P– ouch!” He winces as MJ’s fist connects with his upper arm, and gives her an affronted look.

“He doesn’t know his name, shit-for-brains,” she hisses, and Ned looks hastily down at his coffee cup. “Speaking of..?”

“I’m Harley,” he says. “Nice to, uh, meet you.” She smirks; clearly she, too, is thinking of the library.

“So what do you do?” Ned asks eagerly.

“I’m a biochemical researcher at Yale University,” Harley says, completely deadpan. “But only on weekends when they let me out of Ryker’s.” Ned’s eyes widen, and MJ actually laughs. “I’m kidding,” Harley says, a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth. “I’m in high school, and I work at a pizza place up in Harlem.”

“Oh, sure,” MJ says, “we go to Midtown Tech, in Queens.”

Harley frowns in recognition. “Weren’t you guys in the news a few months ago?”

Ned grimaces. “Yeah, our academic decathlon team was at the Washington Monument when it exploded.”

“Oh, and Spider-Man saved you,” Harley says, his eyes lighting up in comprehension. “Spider-Man saved me too, a few weeks ago.” His two companions glance at each other, their expression unreadable.

“What happened?” MJ asks casually.

“The restaurant where I worked blew up, and Spider-Man got us out.”

“That’s so cool!” Ned gasps, and Harley looks at him with some amusement.

“Didn’t he catch the elevator you were in?”

“Well, uh, yeah,” Ned says, stalling as he catches MJ’s eye again. Harley has a distinct feeling that MJ is trying to stop him from saying too much, which considering Ned’s already almost said his correspondent’s name, is perfectly understandable. How exactly this relates to Ned’s story about Spider-Man, though, is beyond him. “It’s just that he’s cool, that’s all.”

“Sure,” Harley says, as MJ shoots him an expression which clearly says, _I don’t even know._

“Anyway,” MJ says briskly, standing up and pulling a wallet from her backpack. “Coffee’s on us, Harley. What can I get you?”

Once the initial awkwardness of their meeting dies down, Harley’s relieved to find that Ned and MJ are really cool, actually. Not in the conventional sense – Harley’s pretty sure that if they attended his school, they would be even bigger social outcasts than he is. But they’re surprisingly chill (once Ned’s calmed down a little), and whoever this boy whose name begins with ‘P’ is, they talk about him as if the sun shines out of every orifice, which Harley can well believe.

Eventually, they start getting dirty looks from the senior staff, and realise they’ve outstayed their welcome.

“We should get going,” MJ says at last, standing and pulling on her coat. “Ned’s missing the latest episode of _Peppa Pig._ ”

“You’re _so_ funny,” Ned grumbles, but he grabs his coat from the seat next to him all the same. “It was lovely to meet you,” he says sincerely to Harley.

“You too,” he replies. “It’d be cool to all hang out together sometime, whenever we get to that point.” MJ nods curtly and offers him her hand to shake, which he does. They leave the café together, making sure to leave a generous tip by way of apology, then go their separate ways: Harley heads north to find a bus stop, and glances back to see Ned and MJ descending into the subway station.

Feeling very satisfied, he shifts his bag onto the other shoulder. As he does so, however, he freezes, and the deafening cacophony of Times Square seems to fade to silence as he realises his catastrophic mistake.

He’s forgotten to give them the notebook.

“No, no, no, please, no…” He whirls around and breaks into a run, dodging and weaving between tourists posing with the various street performers, sprinting to the subway station. “Move, move, move, move,” he gasps, taking the stairs into the subway two at a time. He spares less than five seconds to scan the departures board for the Queens train, calling rushed apologies to the people he collides with on the way.

His heart pounding in his throat from exertion and panic in equal measure, he skids to a stop on the platform, where the train’s tail-lights are vanishing into the tunnel. He scans desperately up and down the platform – maybe they stopped for snacks, or got held up at the turnstiles, or… or…

 _Or maybe they were on the train after all_ , he realises, sinking hopelessly onto a bench and burying his face in his hands.

It’s at this moment that the true extent of the situation dawns upon him. The trail of messages, his one source of joy and comfort over the last couple of months, has reached a dead end. The prospect of meeting this boy, who may well have become Harley’s closest friend, has vanished without a trace. And in a cruel twist of fate, the countermeasures which they put in place to ensure their safety and anonymity have only guaranteed that Harley will now never truly know this mysterious boy with whom he could plausibly be falling in love.

He waits outside the subway entrance for about two hours, in the faint, desperate hope that they might realise their mistake and come back, but they don’t reappear. Eventually he spies a beat cop looking warily at him, and concludes that he can’t wait any longer. He zips up his bomber jacket, tugs his beanie further down his ears and walks back towards the bus stop, his misery etching a forceful scowl across his face.

It is only a very small relief to find the apartment empty when he arrives back. Normally upon finding himself alone, he would kick up his feet and put something on the television, but instead, he shuts himself in the bedroom and pulls out his math homework, keen to have something else to focus on for a while.

He works furiously, and by the time he hears his mother and sister return, he’s almost finished his assignments for the entire week. Abbie walks in as he tosses his textbook to the end of his bed, and jumps when she sees him.

“You scared the shit out of me,” she says shortly. “Why didn’t you call out when we came in?”

“Was doing homework. How did it go?” he asks, not really caring about the answer. He doesn’t really care about anything at the moment.

She shrugs. “It was okay.” He nods in acknowledgement as she props up her trombone case at the end of her bed, and wanders out again.

He doesn’t want to take it out on her, or his mom, but inside, he’s absolutely livid. He’s _so_ angry he can hardly even think properly. How could he have fucked up so badly? How could he have forgotten to give MJ and Ned the notebook before they left? And how could they have forgotten to ask for it? Unless…

Unless they were never going to take it. Maybe none of this was real after all. A wave of nausea hits him as he realises that there’s absolutely no evidence confirming the existence of the boy he’s been writing to. What if it was just Ned and MJ all along, doing some sort of prank, or social experiment, to see who was lonely and gullible enough to pick up the notebook and write back?

 _If that’s the case_ , he thinks bitterly, _it doesn’t even matter that I didn’t give them the notebook._ If his theory is correct, he didn’t need to; all they needed was the meeting (presumably filmed in secret). If he had given it back, they would probably just have kept it as evidence for whatever sick experiment they were running. How could he have been so _stupid_?

He thinks back to the day in the library when he found the Moleskine on the shelves between two books on relativity theory, and shakes his head. He regrets, now, not just replacing it when he realised it wasn’t relevant to his physics paper. How much time, and hassle, and emotional energy he would have saved!

But he didn’t, of course. And now he’s paying the price for his curiosity: tired, miserable, and lonelier than he’s ever felt in his life.


	9. The Mistake - Peter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Absolutely livid at MJ and Ned's error, Peter lashes out, in more ways than one.

Peter’s hands shake as Aunt May’s voice startles him, and he groans as cereal spills across the counter.

“You’re jumpy today,” she remarks, her eyes narrowing curiously. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing!” Despite his attempt at a casual tone, he immediately realises that his voice is doing that high-pitched thing that happens when he’s lying. He clears his throat and tries again. “Nothing.”

“Peter Benjamin Parker, you are the worst liar I know,” she says sternly, folding her arms and leaning against the doorframe. “Spit it out.”

“I… can’t tell you,” he says, then he sees her expression and adds, “yet. I will, though, if everything works out.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“No,” he replies truthfully.

“Is it legal?”

“Yes.”

“Does it concern… someone special?” He hesitates, and she pounces. “I see,” she says, and for some reason Peter has the impression that she ‘sees’ only too well. “Well, far be it from me to stand in the way of that,” she adds more gently. “Just… be careful, okay?”

“I am,” he says earnestly.

“Good,” she says, the customary jovial tone returning to her voice. “I’ll order dinner to arrive at about six. I thought we could try that new Indian place down the street. Sound good?”

“Sounds great,” he says, pretending to make a fuss as she kisses his forehead. “See you later.”

“Love you!”

“Love you too,” he calls as he rushes out of the door, all thoughts of breakfast forgotten.

The truth is, he’s exceptionally skittish. Ned and MJ met with his mysterious correspondent on Saturday, and he hasn’t heard from them since. The only thing either of them has said was to the effect that they would tell him at school, and two days later, he’s _itching_ with nervous excitement.

He makes a point of arriving earlier than usual and scours the school grounds for his friends. Finally he locates them, hanging out in one of the courtyards; MJ’s chatting with Cindy Moon, and Ned and Betty are on one of the benches, giggling together and being generally sickening.

MJ spots him first and beckons him over, throwing the tab of her Red Bull can at the back of Ned’s head to attract his attention. Peter looks pointedly away as he kisses Betty goodbye, then joins them with an infuriating grin on his face.

Peter waits impatiently for one of them to speak, but when neither does, he bursts out, “Well?”

“Oh my god, Peter,” Ned says excitedly, “it was so cool!”

“What’s he like?” Peter urges them.

“A little surly, but I think he was nervous,” MJ says. “Quiet. Dry sense of humour.”

“About five-nine, strong but kind of skinny, blondish hair,” Ned reels off. “Like, a lot of hair.”

“Long?” Peter asks, but Ned shakes his head.

“Just… big,” he finishes a little lamely. “Like a haystack.”

“Helpful,” Peter says wryly.

“Think Samwise Gamgee, but less curly,” MJ says.

“He’s awesome, Peter,” Ned says.

“Why don’t you date him then?” MJ asks, and Ned scowls at her.

“Well, thanks, guys,” Peter says, relieved. “I’m glad you like him, but I imagine I’ll have to meet his friend now. Can I have the notebook back?” He becomes a little concerned when they both look expectantly at each other.

“What are you looking at me for?” MJ asks with a chuckle. “You’ve got it.”

“No, I didn’t take it,” Ned says, puzzled. “I thought you did.”

Silence falls for a moment before MJ speaks again. “Oh, god.”

Peter closes his eyes and forces himself not to hit them. “Are you telling me… neither of you have the notebook?” Their silence speaks volumes. “Unbelievable.” MJ starts to apologise, but he cuts her off. “Oh, you’re _sorry?_ ” he demands, his eyes blazing. “That’s _it_ , it’s over, do you realise that? Without that notebook, I can’t _ever_ speak to him again!”

“We could look up his social media,” Ned says earnestly, but quails under the force of Peter’s glare.

“Sure, Ned, let’s try,” he replies, his voice heavy with sarcasm. “Should be easy enough to find him among the eight million people who live in New York when all we know is his fucking first name!” Neither Ned or MJ has a response to this, so he continues, “You had exactly one job, and you couldn’t even do that!”

“Not just one job,” Ned says defensively, “we had to meet him, and work out what he’s like, and stuff.”

“Which was your idea, I didn’t ask you to do it!” Peter’s fully shouting now, neither seeing nor caring the peculiar looks of people within earshot. “That meeting _only_ happened because you two _insisted_ on being so goddamned involved in my private life!” Ned opens his mouth to reply, but finds none, and nods in defeat. “Some friends you two are,” Peter finishes savagely. “Thank you _very_ much.”

With that, he turns upon his heel and marches back towards the school’s main entrance. The bell rings as he passes back through the gates, and he weaves through the oncoming students alighting from the south side bus. He’s still shaking with anger, unable to comprehend the betrayal he’s just experienced, intentional or otherwise.

He’s in no doubt at all that he’ll get detention for skipping school, but the thought barely crosses his mind. All he knows that if he has to spend the day sitting next to either Ned or MJ in almost every class (not to mention both in academic decathlon), he’ll kill one or both of them.

It’s nearly two miles walk back to the apartment, but he walks instead of taking the bus, to give him time to clear his head. All he can think about, however, is how the boy in the notebook must be feeling. Did he forget to give MJ and Ned the notebook, or did he decide he didn’t want to continue? What if the situation was too awkward for him, and he decided to back out?

Peter would ask him, but of course, he can’t. He never will.

Not really wanting to alert May, he shimmies up the fire escape and slides in through his bedroom window, tiptoeing to the door and closing it silently. Strains of classic 80s hits sound through the gap in the door, which means she’s probably cleaning. Finally alone, he collapses on his bed and clasps his hands over his face in frustration.

His phone buzzes intermittently, but he switches it off and shoves it in his sock drawer, not wanting to hear anything that his friends have to say. Deep down, he knows he’ll end up forgiving them eventually, but he’s far too angry and upset to be anywhere near that point yet.

He stands up and paces the room, unable to sit still for very long, walking circuits up and down the walls and across the ceiling, because he can. He contemplates going out on a daytime patrol, but if word got out, Aunt May or Mr Stark would find out, and he’d be grounded for sure. By May, not Tony, although Peter doesn’t put it past him.

Thoughts and scenarios fly through his head – what if the boy’s been going back to the notebook drop points? what if he’s given up, like Peter has? – with such speed that he forgets his surroundings, and accidentally kicks over the desk lamp with a clatter as he passes it on one of the walls.

As if Peter flipped a switch, the music outside stops and he closes his eyes in despair. As if things couldn’t get any worse, now his aunt thinks there’s a housebreaker. As if in tune with his thoughts, his webshooters wrap themselves around his wrists, in case she comes prepared. Sure enough, the door bursts open seconds later, and he wordlessly releases a high-impact web shot, pinning her right hand to the wall. A sturdy chef’s knife drops to the carpet with a dull _thud_ , and he offers her an awkward half-smile.

“Peter?” she breathes, her eyes wide in a blend of fright and confusion. “Why are you – I thought there was – what are you doing home already?” she demands, finally choosing a conclusion to one of her sentences.

“Sorry about the web,” he says delicately. “You might not have realised it was me in time.” He steps forward and rips the webbing off the wall, and her arm flops loosely by her side.

“For God’s sake, Peter, I thought we were being robbed!” She’s obviously pissed off, but more than anything she just looks bewildered. “It’s barely 10am, why are you back so early?”

He sinks onto the bed, and apparently sensing his mood, she places the knife carefully on his desk and joins him on the bed. “You know I said there was something I couldn’t tell you?” She nods. “As it turns out, I might as well.”

“I’m listening,” she says quietly, all anger faded.

“I had this notebook,” he says, resolving to leave Tony out of the story, as May’s still not altogether convinced that she likes him. “I wrote a message in it, and left it at MJ’s library.” He reaches for the water bottle on his desk and takes a sip, deciding how best to describe his predicament. “I met a boy through it, and we’ve been talking, and leaving the notebook for the other to find.”

“You’ve been doing _what?_ ” She’s clearly astonished, and more than a little concerned. “Peter, that could have been _anybody!_ ”

“That’s why I left it at the library,” he says hastily. “I told them to give it to MJ, so that she could confirm that they were legit, and not some creep.”

“I still think – ” she continues indignantly, but Peter holds up a hand.

“It was fine, May,” he says, and she subsides. “Anyway, this boy… he’s become sort of, I don’t know, important to me.”

“Oh.” In this moment, in this tiny utterance, he senses the realisation of what he’s telling her, and suddenly there’s a reassuring hand on his back, rubbing soothing circles into his shoulder-blades. Just like that, the moment passes, and he lets out a silent breath of relief; just another piece of information, nothing more. “So something went wrong?”

He nods. “Ned and MJ were desperate to meet him, so they had coffee with him on Saturday in the city.” He sighs in exasperation. “They were supposed to get to know him a bit, and get the notebook back, but they forgot the notebook.”

“And that’s a problem?”

“That was the only way I had of contacting him,” Peter explains. “I’d write a message, tell him where to leave the notebook next, then leave it at the place he asked me to. But I didn’t leave him any other instructions, except for giving it to Ned and MJ, so there’s nothing he can do with it now.”

“Could you go back to some of the other places you left it?” she suggests, but he shakes his head gloomily.

“Even if he thinks to do that, we’ve been talking for weeks,” he says. “Between us, we’ve left it in, like, a dozen different places all across Manhattan.”

“And you know nothing about him?”

“MJ and Ned know his first name,” he says sadly, “and I know he lives in Harlem. But we were very careful, that’s as much as I know. And all he knows about me is that I live in Queens.”

She’s quiet for a long time, and he leans miserably on her shoulder. “This sucks,” she says finally, “and I’m not going to pretend that you’re going to wake up tomorrow and feel okay about it. If this boy meant – _means_ – that much to you, the chances are you’re going to be hurting for a while.”

He doesn’t really know what to say to this depressing statement, so he just lets out a mumbled, “Yeah.”

“I can also tell that you’re mad at your friends, and that’s understandable. It may even feel cathartic, to have someone to blame for what’s going on.”

He nods. She’s right: he _has_ been feeling a certain vindictive pleasure in blaming them for it.

“However, that feeling won’t last, and you’re going to want people around you who can support you. Obviously you can always talk to me, but you won’t always want to.” She smiles at him, and he weakly reciprocates. “So I would say that the first step is to patch things over with Ned and MJ. I’m sure they didn’t mess up on purpose, and they’re probably feeling awful about it too.”

“Probably,” he mutters.

“Maybe don’t go out on patrol this evening,” she suggests, ruffling his hair as she stands up, leaving a few stray curls sticking upwards. “Take the night off. Practise some self-care for once in your life.”

“I don’t know,” he shrugs. “I don’t want to just sit around, with nothing to do except think about the notebook.”

“Suit yourself. Oh, and by the way,” she says, picking up the knife from the desk, “if they don’t apologise, you can always borrow this.” She brandishes it momentarily, to make him laugh, then closes the door on her way out.

After a few hours of homework and television, Peter heads out into the city. It’s a little earlier than usual, but not significantly, so it’s unlikely that Tony will catch wind of anything. It’s still light, too – as March has drawn on, it’s getting lighter in the evenings, which is pleasant. However, not even the warmth of the late afternoon sunshine is enough to significantly lift his spirits.

He swings through the streets of Queens with considerably less of his usual vigour and acrobatics. One passer-by calls to him, requesting (as people often do) that he do a flip; however, Peter can’t even bring himself to oblige them.

“Hey, Karen,” he says eventually, “tune out the police scanner.” He just knows that if the cops turn on him tonight, he’ll end up doing something he’ll regret, and wind up in police custody. Frankly, he just can’t be bothered.

He swings around in a sort of spiral, gradually getting further away from the apartment, watching the sky turn from blue, to orange, to pink, to indigo. He mostly sticks to odd jobs – helping tourists, stopping the occasional pickpocket, and rescuing yet another cat from the tree in the park. (What is it about that tree?)

However, as the few stars visible over the city’s lights start to appear, he freezes in his tracks as a cry rends the air. He hesitates for a few seconds, unsure if the shout belonged to an excited party-goer or someone in genuine trouble.

“Karen, home in on that,” he hisses, and suddenly the voices grow louder in his headset.

“Come on,” says a man’s voice. “You know you want to.” His voice is soft and silky, and sets Peter’s teeth on edge.

“Leave me alone!” It’s a woman’s voice, frightened but clearly struggling. “I’m with friends – they’ll notice – ” Her voice cuts off as though something has been pressed against her mouth. Peter can tell he’s just kissed her, and he sees red.

“Oh, I think not,” Peter mutters, launching into the alley and slamming the ground with enough force to crack the asphalt. The man steps away from the young woman in shock. “You picked a bad night to piss me off, buddy.”

“The fuck..?” he mutters, as she seizes her moment, snatching her hand away from his.

“Run,” Peter commands, but he needn’t have, as she’s already taken off. The man makes to grab her, but Peter shoots a web at his hand and jerks him back, making him stagger a few paces. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he says with a voice bordering on a snarl.

“You know everyone knows you’re a kid, right?” the man says loudly, regaining his balance and squaring up to Peter, who lets out a cold, derisive laugh.

“You really think you could take me?”

“Sure, if you didn’t have your stupid webs and gadgets,” the man sneers.

“Okay, no webs,” says Peter, his eye lenses narrowing in delight at the prospect of teaching this piece of filth a lesson. He raises his fists. “You’re on.”

The man’s fist comes towards his face at the speed of a cannonball, but Peter dodges easily, leaping over him and kicking him squarely in the back of the head on his way down. The man lets out a shout of pain, but whirls back around, only to feel Peter’s fist knock out two of his teeth. He lurches backwards, blood flowing freely from his mouth, as Peter shoots a web-line at each of his feet. He yanks on the strings, knocking the man flat on his back on the concrete.

“You said no webs!” the man says thickly. He tries to shuffle away from the furious vigilante, but Peter deliberately hasn’t disconnected the web-lines.

Peter smiles, immensely satisfied. “Doesn’t feel good to have your consent violated, does it?” The man’s eyes widen in shock as he realises he’s been suckered. “Karen, activate taser webs.”

The man starts to convulse as fifty thousand volts pulse through his body, but Peter doesn’t let up until he hears Karen say, “ _Peter, his life signs are weakening._ ” He immediately stops, and the man lies back against the asphalt, groaning with pain and fatigue. Two web shots to his hands pin him to the ground, and Peter tosses one of his spider-trackers onto him.

“The police will pick you up when they get time,” he says shortly, “and I’m sending them the footage and audio I recorded of what you did. You work for… the _New York Times_ , I see? Well, not anymore, because I’m sending it to their head office, too.”

“You wouldn’t,” he mumbles.

“I already have,” Peter says savagely. “With any luck you’ll end up on the register, and never work again. I hope you’re proud of your decisions tonight.” Even though the man can’t see it, he spares him one final look of contempt, before shooting a web-line to the adjacent building and vanishing into the darkness.

About an hour later, he crawls into bed, exhausted and miserable. He reaches to switch off his desk lamp, then hesitates and pulls his mask back on.

“ _What is it, Peter?_ ”

“I’m sad, Karen,” he says quietly.

“ _Why?_ ”

“The boy.”

“ _The boy in the notebook?_ ”

“Yeah.” She doesn’t reply, so he decides to try something. “Can you find him?”

“ _I’m afraid not._ ”

“But you’re like… omniscient!”

“ _Not exactly,_ ” says her gentle voice. “ _I can access all records of information, but that won’t help you find him. And as for matching a description, I can only know as much as you tell me._ ”

“But I can’t really tell you anything,” Peter mumbles. “Except for the fact that he’s sixteen and lives in Harlem. We haven’t met.”

“ _Given that nearly 150,000 people live in Harlem,_ ” she says patiently, “ _and roughly twenty-four percent of the population is under twenty-one years of age, even this information does not considerably narrow it down._ ”

“Yeah, that’s what I figured,” Peter says. “I just wish I could…” But he never finishes this sentence. Instead, he pulls off the mask, shoves it in his desk drawer and buries his head in his pillow to suppress a sob.


	10. The Solution - Harley

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Retreating to his old coping mechanisms, Harley has a bad day at school, but a sudden realisation turns it around.

Harley glares at the raindrops racing each other down the brittle windows of the bus. _April showers bring May flowers,_ his mother quipped this morning with infuriating cheerfulness. What a ridiculous notion. The window-boxes hanging from intermittent apartment windows are already blooming without the help of the near-torrential rain hammering on the roof of the ancient yellow bus. Besides, it’s only just turned into April, so Harley severely doubts that the universe is aware that everyone’s torn off a sheet of their calendars, and is sending rain as a result.

Today excluded, the weather is generally improving, fresh green leaves are returning to the city’s trees, and the looming prospect of spring break has lifted everyone’s spirits.

 _Well, nearly everyone_ , Harley thinks bitterly, wiping clear a circle in the window’s condensation so he can look out.

“Morning,” says a bright voice, and he offers Zach a silent, upwards nod by way of greeting. He hasn’t had the energy for much more, lately. “Who pissed in your oatmeal?”

“I’m fine,” he says automatically. “Just tired.” By this point, he’s repeated the outright lie so many times that it’s basically muscle memory. He’s almost started to believe it.

“You’re always tired these days,” Zach says, his tone drifting somewhere between concerned and accusatory. “That restaurant working you too hard?”

“Don’t get me started.”

In truth, it’s been hell. Despite that one night of near-genuine human connection, his co-workers have gone right back to their unfriendly treatment of him. Not that Harley cares, of course: he washes dishes, cleans, occasionally serves tables when they’re short-staffed, and minds his own business. They’re not his friends, nor does he want them to be – why should it bother him that they went out for drinks without him the other night? Of course, he’s too young, but that’s not the point. Besides, he’s vaguely wondering if some wanton teenage rebellion might improve his mood a little.

“Well, my weekend was pretty fun, since you haven’t asked,” Zach’s saying, although Harley’s only listening as a courtesy. “We went up the Bowery for my mom’s birthday.”

Although Harley knows it wasn’t intended to be malicious, this anecdote is annoying. Obviously it’s not news to him that Zach’s family is wealthy, but Harley does some quick arithmetic to work out that between taxi fares, entry costs, a meal and drinks, they probably dropped north of three hundred dollars in one night. Considering he just gave his entire month’s paycheck to his mother to help with the rent, it leaves a bit of a sour taste in his mouth.

“Wow,” he says with as much false enthusiasm as he can muster. “Tell her I said happy birthday.” The bus pulls to a stop, and for a second he wonders if Zach noticed the slightly flat tone. Before he has time to scrutinise his friend’s expression further, though, he’s standing up and leading Harley down the aisle towards the doors.

They turn up the collars of their coats and run for it, but even so, Harley’s hair is dripping by the time they duck through the double doors into the school’s main entrance. He runs a hand through it ruefully, leaving a small puddle on the linoleum, and he avoids the janitor’s eye as they pass him.

With some time to spare before the bell rings, they find a wall-mounted heater and lean against it to warm themselves us. Zach mostly talks, and Harley chimes in with an affirmative hum or a “yeah” when he pauses for breath. His expression twists in surprise, though, when a girl he doesn’t know sidles up to them and slips her hand into Zach’s.

“Hi?” Harley says quizzically, and there’s no mistaking the annoyance on Zach’s face now.

“Harley, this is Deedee,” he says, and the irritated expression intensifies as Harley looks blankly at him. “The girl I told you about?” he adds, in the tone one might use when explaining that one and one make two.

“It’s nice to meet you,” she chimes in after a moment of uncomfortable silence. “Zachary’s told me a lot about you.”

“Uh… yeah, you too,” Harley says. Now that he thinks about it, Zach _has_ mentioned her. Quite a few times, actually, and yet he can’t... “Sorry, I didn’t quite… Deirdre, was it?”

“It’s actually Deedee,” she says amicably, and Harley slaps his forehead.

“Right, sorry.” To his immense relief, he’s spared any further embarrassment by the timely sound of the ancient mechanical bells sounding across the school, commanding them to homeroom. He’s also very thankful that he and Zach are in different classes until just before lunch: if looks could kill, Harley would be in an ambulance on a respirator. “I’ll, uh, see you later,” he says with a brave stab at a reconciliatory tone.

“Sure. Don’t hurt yourself,” Zach says, wandering off with his arm around Deedee’s shoulder and not looking back. Harley sighs, and brushes his damp hair out of his eyes as he sets out towards his homeroom.

It’s as he’s sitting in his math class that the notebook pops into his head for the first time since last night. He’s been thinking about it less and less over the last couple of weeks, trying to shut it from his mind in the hopes of moving on.

He toyed for some time with the idea of throwing it away, or burning it in some sort of cleansing ritual, but decided against it. He hasn’t opened it, though, despite having been tempted a few times at first, to reread the messages from the beginning. He’s been forcing himself not to, in an attempt to move on, but he’s stowed it deep in his shoulder bag, under various papers and candy wrappers. There it can stay, for the moment, as a reminder of the danger of trusting people.

Now, though, the vaguely blurry image he’s constructed of the notebook boy fills his mind’s eye, sitting at a desk, hunched over the notebook, writing eagerly in his familiar, wild half-cursive.

“Mr Keener?” Mr Anderson calls loudly from the front of the class. “Perhaps you would like to tell us which trigonometric process I would use to calculate this angle?”

Harley glances absently at the whiteboard. “No,” he says, and tries to zone out again, but is interrupted once more.

“You can at least try.” His famously short-tempered teacher’s moustache is starting to twitch; it’s a clear danger signal, but Harley’s feeling reckless.

“No, I don’t think I will.” Refusing even to meet Mr Anderson’s eye, he doodles a little tree in the corner of his paper.

“Mr Keener, you will suggest a response, or you will go an explain your lack of co-operation to Vice-Principal Chowdhury.”

“You want a response?” Harley says mildly, finally making eye contact. “Go fuck yourself.”

A murmur of shock and amusement ripples around the class, and Mr Anderson slams his board eraser down on his desk. “Silence!” he snaps, and a low giggle replaces the murmurs. “Get out, now,” he orders Harley, who nods slowly.

“A’ight,” he shrugs, tucking his belongings into his backpack with deliberate casualness as a bright yellow post-it explaining his crimes is thrust into his hand.

“Take this to Mrs Chowdhury.”

“Okay.” Harley slings his backpack onto his shoulder and exits the classroom at a gentle stroll.

“And shut the door behind you,” Mr Anderson calls angrily, but Harley ignores him, and smirks with satisfaction when he hears it slam behind him.

Despite his total apathy towards the situation, he has enough sense to realise that he’s already facing suspension, and that he risks expulsion if he doesn’t now go to the vice-principal’s office, so with a sigh of resignation, he heads up the stairs towards the corridor at the front of the school where the main offices are.

Upon his arrival, Vice-Principal Chowdhury’s secretary raises an eyebrow at him. He offers her a tight-lipped smile, and hands over the post-it. She rolls her eyes, but gestures to the small leather couch on the wall opposite the office as she picks up the phone to talk to the vice-principal. He collapses into it, and sighs as he sinks into its squashy cushions.

“Don’t get too comfortable,” the secretary warns him. “You’re not here for a nap. Mrs Chowdhury will see you in a few minutes.”

“You can move that red six to the black seven on the left,” he says by way of reply, and she quickly minimises the solitaire game on her computer screen. She casts him a disapproving look, but all the same, he definitely sees the corner of her mouth twitch upwards as she turns back to her task. “So, any fun plans for spring break?” he says with the same jovial tone to his voice.

She’s turning back to him, presumably to tell him to shut up, when the heavy office door opens smoothly, the doorway framing the silhouette of the school’s vice-principal. Estimated by most to be in her early sixties and standing at an imposing five-foot-ten, Mrs Chowdhury carries a sense of intense gravitas. She is known by the entire school to take no shit from anyone – least of all, Harley supposes, students who curse out their teachers with little provocation.

Most teachers are the subject of ridicule among their charges when out of earshot, but not she. Mrs Chowdhury is treated with a respect bordering on reverence, thanks to her fair, firm handling of the issues she encounters. In twenty-seven years at the school, she has never once issued punishment that outweighed the crime. She has never received a complaint of bullying or harassment that she has not handled with the utmost respect, nor has she ever allowed a bully or oppressor to go unpunished. She never raises her voice. She never belittles. She thus commands respect, and although no one would dare defy her, no one wants to, either.

“Mr Keener?” she says, perfectly calmly. He nods and stands, and she steps aside and gestures into the room. “Do come in.” It is not a request, and it never occurs to Harley to disobey. He’s been in her office before, but not recently, so he looks around, taking everything in. It’s not enormous, but its minimalist design makes it seem bigger. The senior year class photos line the walls, one for each year that Mrs Chowdhury has worked there.

In the centre of the room sits her elegant ebony desk, with three identical upright chairs carefully positioned facing it, for visitors. On the desk sits a small laptop, an upright calendar and a few personal effects, including her wedding photograph. A small, secret smile creeps onto Harley’s face when he spots the two brides beaming at each other, under an elegant archway of white carnations.

She closes the door behind them, and lowers herself into her office chair, indicating that he should take a seat opposite her. “Please explain the events leading to your eviction from your class.”

So he does. He tells the truth, for the first time in weeks, and she listens, silently and intently. He doesn’t mention the notebook, but he tells her that he’s suffered a disappointment, and that he’s been feeling truly miserable for the better part of a month. He tells her about the blast and his change in job. He tells her that his father, who keeps attempting to contact him despite his best efforts, is always somewhere in the back of his mind, and that he’s fairly certain his best friend is mad at him.

“I wasn’t in a good headspace,” he finishes. “I lashed out.”

“I see,” she says. He remains quiet, sensing that it is no longer his turn to speak. “Mr Keener, I understand your quandary, and I empathise. I read in the news about the incident at your former employment, and I can imagine how that, in particular, must have affected you very deeply. I will, of course, take this into consideration.” She rests her elbows on the desk and steeples her fingers. “Have you considered talking to a professional about all of this?”

“I can’t,” he says roughly, and she waits patiently for him to explain. “For one thing, I simply don’t have the time to go to see a therapist. For another…” He chokes in embarrassment at the words, but swallows his pride and continues. “We really… can’t afford to.”

“The school has an excellent guidance counsellor. I’m sure an appointment with Mr Lewis can be arranged, at no charge,” she replies, but he shakes his head.

“With respect, ma’am,” he says, hating how his voice shakes, “I don’t think that’s a good idea. A guidance counsellor would be obliged to tell my mom anything that concerned them.”

“Should we be concerned, then?” she asks kindly.

“I would say no,” he says, managing a weak smile, “but I can’t guarantee that Mr Lewis and I will agree, and I don’t need my mother’s input right now.”

She nods slowly again, digesting this. “As I have said, I realise that your actions today were not the result of a desire to cause trouble for trouble’s sake.” She sighs, and Harley braces himself. “However, you will no doubt understand that there must be consequences.”

“Am I being suspended?” he asks, and she smiles ruefully.

“Not today.” His eyebrows flicker in surprise. “You will attend detention every afternoon for the rest of the week, and I would like you to apologise to Mr Anderson in person. However,” she adds, rising from her chair to indicate that this meeting is at its end, “I suggest you leave that until tomorrow. Teachers are only human, after all, and I can’t imagine he’ll be too thrilled to see you at this moment.”

“Thanks,” he says, unsure of what else to say, but reassured by the sparkle of amusement in her dark eyes.

“A pleasure, Mr Keener. Please see yourself out; as you can imagine, I have much to attend to.”

He decides not to join Zach and Deedee at lunch, not wanting to irate him any further, so he retreats to the library to catch up on the work he didn’t get to do during his math class. There are about ten minutes left of the lunch hour when Zach plops down on the other side of Harley’s desk.

“Oh,” Harley says, slightly cautiously. “Hi.”

“Hey,” Zach says, still seeming as frosty as he was a few hours ago. “Wondered where you were when you didn’t turn up for lunch.”

“Didn’t want to… you know,” he says in a small voice. “Piss you off even more.”

Zach sighs. “I know you’ve had kind of a shitty couple of months,” he says, his tone slightly more docile. “It’s just that you’ve also been kind of a shitty friend recently.” Harley looks up from his textbook in surprise. “I mean, I’ve been talking to you about Deedee for weeks, and you couldn’t even remember her name.”

“I know,” Harley says, sounding apologetic for the first time. “I… I’m sorry. You’re right, I’ve been kind of an asshole. I’ll do better.”

Zach offers him a tight smile, and nods in approval. “I’ve been meaning to ask,” he says thoughtfully, “why _have_ you been so… distracted?”

Harley considers the question, weighing up how much to tell him. “There’s this notebook,” he replies slowly. “I found it in Grand Central Library, and I’ve been talking to… someone through it.”

“Why?” Zach asks, puzzled.

“We’ve become friends,” Harley says, his heart hammering in his chest. “And I… really like them.”

“Huh.” Zach ponders this. “So does she have the notebook now?”

“He,” Harley says in a barely audible murmur, and Zach’s eyebrows lift in surprise.

“Oh?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, cool,” Zach says. “Does _he_ have the notebook, then?”

He breathes a silent sigh of relief, but shakes his head, reaching into his bag and pulling the Moleskine out from its depths. “I met his friends, but they forgot to take it.” He decides not to mention his suspicions that it might all have been a set-up.

“Damn,” Zach says with feeling. “And you have no idea who this guy is?”

“Nope,” Harley says gloomily. “We agreed, no names, no social media stalking, no overly specific details. I don’t even know what he looks like.”

“ _Damn_ ,” Zach says again, with more emphasis. They fall silent for a little while, then Zach speaks again. “Have you read any of it since it ended?”

“Why would I?” Harley says dismissively, drumming his fingers on the notebook’s rear cover, its crimson faux-leather now slightly faded from use. “I’ve been trying to forget about it.”

“I just thought there might be some clue,” Zach shrugs. “Something to help you find him, you know.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Harley says without much conviction. “I guess there’s no harm in looking.”

At the end of the day, Harley finds himself once again scanning the detention hall as he hands Mrs Schultz the yellow detention card issued to him by Vice-Principal Chowdhury. The regulars are there, of course, and Undercut Boy is back, although he doesn’t acknowledge Harley. There are a few others he doesn’t recognise, so he heads to the back of the room, as far from anyone as possible. Normally he uses detention to catch up on schoolwork, but today he has another task in mind; instead, he places the red notebook reverently on the desk in front of him.

Captain America once again appears on the television screen, but Harley doesn’t heed him at all. Once he’s sure that no one is paying him any attention, he opens it to the first page, and smiles wistfully at the words inscribed inside.

 _Hello_! _If you’re reading this, congratulations!_ _You’ve passed the first challenge. If you’re interested, there are a few more on the following pages._

The familiar handwriting continues, as it did all that time before, outlining the rules of the arrangement, and the criteria for taking part. He reads every word with as much intensity as he did each time the boy left the notebook for him, in all their different hiding places across their city. Harley’s heart hurts as he reads line after line of his own writing, pouring his heart out to this faceless stranger, and sees the earnest replies of the other boy.

Because he’s scrutinising each line so carefully, it’s a while before he turns the page and chuckles as he finds the boy’s scavenger hunt. That was a fun day: he wandered all around Midtown, searching for a suitable landmark, until he found himself in front of the Chrysler building. In the end, he tucked it into a small privet hedge on one of the street corners, then had to walk a few blocks to be able to take a decent snapshot of the building. _Then, of course_ , he thinks with amused derision, _I had to text it to –_

“Oh my god,” he whispers, his eyes falling on the footnote under the very last line of the page, and in this wonderful, terrible moment, he realises his mistake.

Immediately after the Hard Rock Café incident, he ruled out the possibility of contacting MJ. He had already deleted her number weeks prior, having concluded that it would be too great a temptation, and that keeping it could jeopardise their game. When he didn’t hear from her, he could only assume that she had done likewise.

Never once did it occur to him that he still had it in the notebook, and he runs a hand through his hair in disbelief at his own stupidity. He closes the notebook, surreptitiously tucking it into his jacket, and raises his hand.

“Excuse me?” he says, in as calm a tone as he can muster.

“Yes, Mr Keener?”

“I, uh, have to use the bathroom.”

“There are only thirty minutes remaining,” says the beleaguered Mrs Schultz, who’s clearly annoyed at being interrupted from her book. “Can you really not wait?”

“No,” he says, squirming in his seat to reinforce the lie. “Sorry.” She relents and gestures to the door with an exasperated sigh, and Harley walks out, trying hard to keep his gait casual.

The second he’s out of earshot, he breaks into a run, bursting into the boys’ restroom and skidding to a stop on the recently-mopped tiles. He slams the notebook down on the counter where the sinks are, fumbling in his pocket for his phone with the other hand. He opens the notebook to the essential page, and taps the number into his phone, his hands shaking.

He’s just made the call, when the Moleskine overbalances and slides into the sink. The movement triggers the motion sensors in the faucet, and cold water cascades down onto the precious notebook, drenching it. “For fuck’s sake!” Harley explodes, fishing it out angrily and making a half-hearted attempt to siphon off the water with the corner of his jacket. “Come on, pick up,” he growls through gritted teeth, and suddenly the ringtone stops.

“ _Hey, you’ve reached MJ_ ,” says a slightly tinny voice. “ _Leave a message. Or don’t. I don’t really care._ ”

“MJ, it’s Harley,” he says as soon as he hears the tone. “You know, the notebook boy. I know it’s been a month, and I can’t think why it took me this long to think of this, but it was the only way I could think of getting through to one of you. Can you call me back?”


	11. The Heist - Peter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peter foils a robbery, makes a new enemy, and gets some startling news - all in less than twenty-four hours.

Peter shivers as a few droplets of water permeate his sodden super-suit. It’s been raining for the better part of two days without ceasing, which makes his patrols immensely uncomfortable. Still, poor weather doesn’t significantly reduce crime rates, which is why he’s currently clinging to the underside of the canopy of the movie theatre, just for a brief respite.

“Karen,” he says crossly, “activate the suit heater, please.” Immediately the suit begins to dry, and the numbness in his extremities starts to subside. All things considered, he’s not in the best mood.

After his conversation with Aunt May, Peter assumed that he would start to move on from the notebook debacle and the boy with whom it connected him. And he was right, for a little while: although he felt a little guilty for having been so aggressive on patrol that night, he felt a little more content about the situation, for a day or two, anyway.

However, it didn’t last. After a couple of days and about a hundred unanswered texts in their group chat, Peter approached Ned and MJ and talked it out with them. They apologised profusely, both for meddling in Peter’s arrangement with the boy in the notebook, and for forgetting to retrieve it. Peter forgave them, only slightly reluctantly.

“What was his name?” he asked them quietly at the end of the conversation.

“Harley,” MJ said, and Peter felt hopeful for a moment.

“That’s not such a common name,” he said. “Maybe we could find him after all.”

“Sorry, Peter,” Ned said sadly, “but we’ve tried. If he’s on any social media, he’s hidden it very well.”

It’s been a long month. Every so often, Peter’s caught himself thinking, _I need to make time to go get the notebook_ , before remembering that he’s never going to have to again. He just can’t seem to wrap his mind around the fact that it’s over; he knew Harley for such a relatively short amount of time, and yet it somehow feels as though he’s been part of Peter’s life forever. He feels, incorrigibly, as though he’s lost something very precious.

Now, he sighs and shuts off the heater; after all, there’s little point in having it on while he’s out in the rain. Shivering once at its absence, he braces himself and swings out into the night.

“Alright, Karen,” he says, slightly lacking in enthusiasm. “Anything weird happening?”

“ _I’m detecting some unusual readings underneath the bank,_ ” she replies.

“What kind of readings?”

“ _I’m not sure. I might be able to run a better scan from a closer distance._ ”

“Copy that,” he says, flicking a web out to slingshot himself round a corner towards the main banking building. Crouched on a nearby rooftop, he casts his eyes around the vicinity, scanning for anything unusual. His gaze is drawn to what seems to be a cavity in a nearby construction yard. “Karen,” he says thoughtfully, “what are they building there?”

“ _According to the city’s files, it’s going to be a new office building._ ”

Peter hums and affirmative and bounces over the rooftops until he has a better view, and his mask lenses widen at what he sees.

An enormous cavity has been bored into the wall of dirt, where the builders are clearly planning to build a basement floor. Peter drops down in front of it, and examines the caterpillar tracks leading into it. Evidently whoever made this hole has some seriously powerful equipment.

“Karen, scan for life forms,” he whispers. “How many are we dealing with here?”

“ _It’s not clear,_ ” she says. “ _I would estimate four or five, but there are so many in the neighbouring tower block that it’s interfering with my sensors._ ”

“That’s not ideal,” Peter says thoughtfully. “I’ll just have to be quiet, then.” He creeps up the wall, and crawls around its curvature until he’s on the ceiling, advancing as quietly as he can and wincing when loose clumps of earth fall to the ground. “Any better?” he whispers as they draw nearer.

“ _Yes,_ ” she replies. “ _There are six – four male, two female._ ”

“One on six, not my favourite ratio,” he muses. “That is, assuming they’re up to no good, which considering they’ve burrowed a tunnel underneath the bank, they probably are.”

“ _Shall I alert the police?_ ”

“Not yet.” Since he’s now fairly confident that the bank is being robbed, the last thing he wants is to get caught in the crossfire and allow the criminals to escape. “I’ll tell you when.”

Finally, the tunnel opens out into a massive underground room, which Peter suspects must be the vault. He briefly wonders why no alarms have been tripped, but then it occurs to him that anyone with good enough equipment to dig this hole is probably capable of hacking an alarm system. It’s hardly the gun-at-the-counter hold-up approach most would-be bank robbers employ; these guys must be the real deal.

He leaps to the shadow of some large water pipes running down the far wall, and has Karen to tune in on their conversation and record it.

“Come on!” one of them says, presumably the leader; a gruff, thick-set man, probably mid-forties, with a thick New York accent. “We ain’t got all night. The alarm’s failsafe will kick in in a minute, and we gotta be on our way out before then!”

“You try shifting bullion any faster, old man,” snaps one of the women. “This shit’s heavy.”

“Why do you think we got the carts?” he shoots back. “The boss ain’t gonna be happy with a purse full of fifties, dumbass! Now get moving,” he growls to them all, and they return to work, lugging gold bars and massive sports bags full of notes onto massive industrial carts, mostly likely used to move sacks of concrete.

“You know there’s an ATM right up the street, right, guys?” Peter says loudly, not revealing his hiding place. Instantly, all six of them are pointing a gun in different directions, trying to work out where the voice came from.

The flat walls of the basement create an excellent acoustic, and Peter finds it’s relatively easy to throw his voice. In fact, it occurs to Peter that he might be able to dispatch a few of them before they’ve even worked out where he is.

“Trip web,” he hisses, aiming carefully at the entrance to the tunnel and shooting two. He attaches another to the door of the vault, and waits. “Cops are on their way.” His voice echoes across the room, and the robbers start to look nervous. “Wait for it,” he mutters, and finally, one of the men step into the trip line. Within seconds, he’s bound up and struggling against the heavy vault door, wrapped head to foot in a sticky spider-web.

“It’s Spider-Man!” another shouts. “Scatter!”

The leader, furious and apparently terrified, calls, “Grab what we’ve got and run!”

Peter watches with interest as the two women seize the first cart and start dragging it doggedly towards the tunnel entrance. They both let out a yell of surprise as they, too, are slammed against the wall, immobilised.

With half of them already out of the picture, Peter feels a lot safer partaking in hand-to-hand combat, but for good measure, he webs one of their guns and throws it at the leader, before body-slamming the third guy. He dodges the leader’s gunfire with relative ease, activating the drone installed into the front of his suit to fire stinging shots back at them.

“Missed,” he says casually, as he steps out of the trajectory of a heavy punch, which had it connected, would probably have broken his jaw. “And again!” he exclaims as he flips away from a follow-up hit. “Honestly, guys, I expect better fighting from such a well-planned heist. I was impressed how you managed to hack the alarms – you’d have got away with it if I hadn’t noticed your tunnel.”

“Stop talking!” the leader snarls, and Peter laughs.

“Clearly we haven’t met before.” The leader charges at him, but Peter neatly sidesteps and lets him crash into the enormous excavator. “Also, I know I said I admired you, but you’ve got to be a little bit stupid to try robbing a bank in Spider-Man’s district. I mean, it didn’t once occur to you to try Brooklyn? Or the Bronx? Or even a quiet little place upstate?” The second guy reaches for his gun, out of reach on the ground, but Peter kicks his legs out from under him and elbows the leader in the face. “You just don’t get decent criminals anymore, you know? Like, where did they all go? Oh, I remember,” he says, feigning a dawning realisation. “Prison.”

With this, he leaps into the air and knocks their heads together, hard. They collapse to the ground, groaning, and Peter webs the gold cart by the tunnel and hauls it back towards the vault. He can hear approaching sirens, and takes this as his cue to leave.

“You’ll be fine,” he says. “Well, not really, you’re facing at least twenty years inside for attempted grand larceny, but I meant you’ll only have a mild concussion at worst.”

“Fuck you,” the leader groans, but Peter ignores the slight.

“Who’s this ‘boss’ you were talking about?” he asks, his tone suggesting nothing more than casual conversation between friendly acquaintances. “Who are you working for? You might be able to get a decreased sentence if you can convince the court you were coerced.”

“He’d kill me if I told,” the leader spits back.

“So he’s a ‘he’,” Peter notes. “Thanks, that narrows it down – by about half, actually. Enjoy Ryker's.”

He hears shouts approaching from the stairs outside the basement, and sprints back down the tunnel as quickly as his legs will carry him.

Once he’s confident that the police have the situation under control, he swings away, satisfied with a job done. He’s mid-air, barely a block away, when something slams into him with unimaginable force, sending a blinding pain through his nose and face. Barely even conscious, Peter falls backwards, landing heavily on his back, on the stone roof of an apartment block. He lets out a groan of pain, then immediately rolls to his left as a golden boot connects with the concrete with a metallic _clang_.

“You have interfered with my operation, _Spider-Man_ ,” snarls a harsh voice. “And you have cost me millions this night alone. Prepare to die.” Two brass gauntlets seize him, and Peter gasps for air as his attacker starts to tighten their grip on his throat. He wrests one arm free, and shoots a single web into his assailant’s dull ochre mask, obscuring the bright red eye-lenses and blinding him.

His attacker roars in irritation, and throws Peter to the ground. Stubbornly ignoring the pain coursing through his body, Peter leaps over this masked psychopath and aims a solid punch to the back of his calf. His opponent overbalances and sinks to one knee, as Peter swings into another kick to the face, planting a hand on the ground as he skids to a stop on the slippery concrete roof.

“Who are you?” he demands, and the attacker’s blazing red eyes turn on him.

“I am the Hobgoblin,” he hisses. “And I shall not forget the wrong you have done me this night, Spider-Man.” With sudden, boundless strength, he leaps across the rooftops, and by the time Peter thinks to follow, his new adversary has vanished into the night.

“Shit,” he mutters, rubbing his bruised back. Knowing him, he’ll have healed before he arrives at school tomorrow, but it still hurts. “Karen, call Mr Stark.”

The call connects almost instantaneously, and Peter can see that he’s still in the lab. “ _Mr Parker!_ ” he says cheerfully. “ _Little late for a social call, don’t you think?_ ”

“Mr Stark, something’s happened.”

“ _FRIDAY told me about the bank,_ ” Tony continues with a sniff. “ _It’s on the news as we speak. Criminals webbed up all over the place – your handiwork, I presume? Good job, that would have been quite a pickle if they’d got away._ ”

“Mr Stark,” Peter says desperately, and Tony tilts his head. “This wasn’t an isolated incident.”

“ _Seems unlikely, but I’m listening. What makes you say that?_ ”

“I was attacked,” he explains. “Just after I left the bank, by someone calling himself the… the Hobgoblin.”

“ _The Hobgoblin?_ ” Tony repeats thoughtfully. “ _Leave it with me, Spiderling, I’ll look into it._ ”

“Thanks, Mr Stark. Is there anything I can do?”

He considers it. “ _Not for now. But I trust your judgement, and I will make some inquiries, kid. I promise I’ll let you know if I find anything._ ” Peter nods, and Tony smiles. “ _Well, if there’s nothing else..?_ ” When Peter shakes his head, Tony raises a hand in farewell. “ _Good night, Mr Parker._ ”

“’Night, Mr Stark.” His heads-up display lets out a gentle _beep_ as the call disconnects, leaving him alone in the rain once again.

* * *

As usual, Ned accosts him the second he gets on the bus.

“Tell me everything,” he says excitedly. Peter hesitates, glancing around the bus; it’s immediately obvious, though, that everyone is too preoccupied with their own conversations to be bothered by what he’s saying.

“So, there’s this tunnel in that big construction site by the bank, right?” Ned nods eagerly. “I followed it, and it went right underneath the bank.”

“Awesome,” Ned grins, even though Peter hasn’t said anything remotely interesting yet.

“And there’s like… half a dozen guys,” he continues, “and they all have guns, right?”

“Sick.”

“And they’re loading all this gold onto carts, and I’m like, ‘hey, you know there’s an ATM up the street?’ but they can’t see me, so I, like, start picking them off one by one, until there’s just two left.”

“Incredible.”

“But then the leader’s like, ‘the boss will be really angry if we don’t get the money’, so I’m like, ‘who’s your boss?’”

“Amazing.”

“He doesn’t tell me, right, so I knock him out anyways.” Ned practically squeals with delight, and Peter grins. “So I’m on my way out, and someone punches me in the face.”

“No way.”

“He grabs me by the throat, and he’s all like, ‘prepare to die, Spider-Man.’”

“Holy shit,” Ned gasps.

“So I say, ‘who are you?’ and he says, ‘I’m the hobgoblin,’ and I’m like ‘whoa’,” says Peter, putting on a shocked expression for effect. “And then he’s like ‘I won’t forget this’, and runs away.”

“That is insane.” Ned’s expression is completely solemn, and Peter almost laughs. “Do you think you’ll see this… Gobgoblin again?”

“Hobgoblin,” Peter corrects him. “And I mean… probably. I called Mr Stark, and he said that he’d make some calls and see what he could find out.”

“Okay, I know it’s been months,” Ned says, “but it’s still crazy that you can just say ‘I called Tony Stark’ in a sentence, and think it’s totally normal.”

“I know,” Peter says with a sheepish smile. “Trust me, it’s weird to me as well.”

Throughout the day, Peter struggles to focus on his classes, his mysterious new adversary taking up much of his headspace, even once academic decathlon starts. MJ puts them through the usual drills, starting them off with a few brain teasers, before moving onto actual practice questions. Normally Peter thrives at decathlon, but today, he just can’t focus.

“What is the atomic number of thulium?”

 _Ding._ “Sixty-nine,” Betty says, as Cindy and Abe high-five.

“Correct,” MJ says with a smirk.

“Aw, you’re so clever,” Ned beams, and Peter rolls his eyes.

“These questions are _super_ basic, Jones,” Flash says, unimpressed. “I told Mr Harrington I should be captain.”

“Just because I’m grading quizzes doesn’t mean I can’t hear you,” says their beleaguered teacher from the other end of the room.

“Okay, Flash,” she says, rounding on him. “How can you subtract two from five and leave four?”

He stutters, trying to reach an answer. “I guess it must have something to do with recurring decimals… you, uh, round down instead of up?”

“No, you remove two letters, ‘f’ and ‘e’,” MJ says, with a _better-luck-next-time_ smile. “Leaving you with the Roman numeral IV, meaning four.”

Flash looks down at his notepad and mutters something inaudible to himself, clearly embarrassed.

“Now that’s dealt with,” MJ says briskly, “back to work. Peter!” He jumps, his mind still firmly on the Hobgoblin. “You haven’t answered anything yet. How can you get the number 6 using only three zeros?”

Peter looks blankly at her, forcing the gears in his mind to turn. “Uh, factorials,” he replies after a few seconds.

“Elaborate.”

“Well, zero factorial equals one,” he says, thinking faster than he has all day, “add all three together and you get three. Three factorial is six.”

“Correct,” MJ says approvingly. “Nice to know you’re still with us.” He meets Flash’s glare with a mild smile, and resumes his daydreaming. “Timed question, five seconds – how many times does the number five occur between one and one hundred?”

Ned’s bell _dings_ with one second left on MJ’s timer. “Twenty?” he ventures.

“That is correct.”

“Now you’re so smart!” Betty says delightedly, leaning over to kiss him on the cheek.

“Whoa, children,” MJ says, holding up a hand. “Save it for the playground, please. How do you calculate density?”

 _Ding._ “Mass divided by volume,” says Cindy.

“Correct. Which part of the brain deals with hearing and language?”

 _Ding._ “The temporal lobe,” calls Abe.

“Correct. Seven, fourteen, forty-two, one-hundred-sixty-eight. What is the next number in the sequence?”

 _Ding._ “462,” says Flash.

“Incorrect, the answer is 840. What is the pH level of ammonia, to one decimal?”

 _Ding._ “Eleven-point-six,” calls Betty.

“Correct. How many – ”

Suddenly, as though a lightbulb has switched on, Peter’s spider-sense is nearly crippling him. He’s not sure why, but all he knows is that he needs to leave the auditorium, immediately. He kicks back his chair and walks quickly away, breaking into a jog as he nears the door. MJ’s voice tails off as the group watch him leave.

“Uh,” she says, hastening to take back command of the room. “Take five, everyone.” Peter vaguely notices her pull her cell phone out of her jacket pocket before the door closes behind him, and he sinks to the floor between two rows of lockers, burying his face in his hands.

“Peter,” says a worried voice – Ned’s. He shakes his head violently, his heart pounding in his chest. “Peter, what’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” he mumbles. He forces himself to look up at Ned, and as he does, the overwhelming sensation starts to die down.

“There you go,” Ned says gently, seeing Peter’s breathing start to regulate again. He slumps down beside him and offers him a sympathetic smile. “What happened?” he asks, as Peter lowers his knees from his chest and leans back against the wall.

“I’m not sure,” Peter admits. “It was just… suddenly too much, like everything good and bad was happening at once.”

“ _Parker!_ ” calls MJ’s voice from the auditorium. She bursts out, looking so agitated that it’s alarming. She holds out her cell phone, and Peter looks blankly at him.

“What?”

“It’s _him_ ,” she says breathlessly.

“The Hobgoblin?” he replies, forgetting in his confusion that he hasn’t yet told her about last night.

“What? No, it’s _Harley_!” she shakes the phone for emphasis, and Peter gasps audibly. He takes the phone with shaky hands, and shoos Ned and MJ back into the auditorium.

“Hello?” he says, still not entirely convinced that this isn’t some type of trick.

“ _Hi,_ ” says the voice on the other end. “ _I’m Harley_.” Peter lets out a silent, shaky breath of laughter, hardly daring to believe it.

“I’m Peter,” he says, “but how did… why haven’t… what?”

The receiver emits a low chuckle. “ _Yeah, that about sums it up._ ” Peter swallows hard and waits. “ _Firstly, I’m so, so sorry about the notebook. I went after your friends the moment I realised I still had it, but by the time I caught up they were already on the train._ ”

“But how did you get MJ’s number?” Peter asks, profoundly overwhelmed.

“ _You gave it to me,_ ” says Harley simply. “ _In the notebook, remember? When you asked me to send you a landmark._ ”

“Of course,” Peter breathes, feeling very foolish. How could he have forgotten?

“ _I’m sorry it took me so long to think of it,_ ” says Harley, but Peter’s barely even registering the words; he’s too busy listening to the voice. It’s deeper than his, with a rich quality to it, but it breaks very slightly at the end of his sentences, which Peter finds incredibly endearing.

“So where are you leaving it?” Peter asks. “The notebook, I mean.”

“ _I’m not,_ ” says the voice, rather bluntly, and Peter’s heart sinks. It’s been too long; he’s had enough, and wants out.

“Oh. Okay.”

“ _No, wait, that’s not what I’m saying,_ ” Harley says hastily. “ _Sorry, I’m not great with words. I mean, I don’t want to have to use the notebook to talk to you anymore – I want to meet you, for real._ ”

At these words, Peter’s heart just about stops, and he finds himself momentarily tongue-tied. “Sure,” he says eventually. “Sure, yes, I… I’d like that too.”

“ _Cool,_ ” Harley says, and it sounds to Peter as though he’s smiling. “ _How soon can you get into Manhattan?_ ”

“I can be there in about twenty minutes,” Peter says. “Wait, where shall I meet you?”

“ _Grand Central Library. See you there._ ” Peter smiles at these words: where else, but the place where it began?

MJ pokes her head around the door, and Peter passes her phone back. “Everything okay?”

“Never better,” Peter says with the most genuine smile he’s worn in weeks. “But I’m afraid I’m going to need to cut early. There’s somewhere I’ve got to be.”


	12. The Park - Harley

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harley and Peter find themselves back at the library where it all began - only this time, they're there together.

For the sixth time, Harley pulls his phone from his pocket and glances at the time. Peter said he would be twenty minutes – twenty-five minutes ago. _Relax_ , he tells himself, forcing himself to breathe slowly. _It was an estimate. He’s coming._

He taps his phone against his hand, his throat suddenly dry. _But why hasn’t he texted?_

“Because he’s on the subway, obviously,” he mutters to no one in particular, trying to block out the intrusive voice in his head, taunting him for believing Peter.

An awful thought strikes him: will Peter recognise him when he sees him? Moreover, will he know Peter? What if Peter sees him, and decides he doesn’t like what he sees? He taps out a quick text to the number MJ sent him to let Peter know where he is, and jumps as he hears a _ping_ a few seconds later from behind the shelves.

Sure enough, a boy is walking towards him with a sopping-wet coat tucked under his arm; he’s wearing a navy flannel shirt under a yellow woollen pullover, even though it’s sixty-six degrees outside and rain is falling in a steady mist. The neat styling of his dark hair has lost its definition, and he sweeps a few stray curls off his forehead. For a moment, he stands stock-still at the end of the aisle, a look of pure shock on his face, but then he composes himself, and a cautious smile creeps onto his face.

“Are you Harley?” he asks cautiously, and Harley breathes a sigh of relief.

“Yeah,” he replies – suddenly, inexplicably shy. It’s strange: all he’s said to Peter, everything they know about each other, and as they stand and gaze at each other, Harley feels oddly exposed. “You must be Peter.”

Peter nods, and his face breaks out into a dazzling smile. “I was so worried.”

“Me too,” he admits, and Peter bites his lip.

“I’m sorry,” he blurts out, and Harley must look surprised, because he goes on, “for letting MJ and Ned be involved, I mean. That wasn’t fair on you.”

“It’s okay,” Harley says simply. “I’m sorry it took me, like, a month to think of texting MJ.”

“To be fair to you, I didn’t think of it either,” Peter shrugs, and slumps to the ground, leaning back against the bookcase.

“Did you run?” Harley asks, amused. He joins him on the floor, leaning against the opposite bookcase so he can look at him.

“I got off the subway at the wrong station,” Peter says with a grimace. “That’s why I was late. Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Harley smiles, and he means it, wondering why he was so anxious before. There’s still something bugging him, though: he can’t shake the feeling that he’s heard Peter’s voice somewhere before. “We haven’t… met, have we?”

“I don’t think so,” Peter says, but it momentarily occurs to Harley that Peter’s not quite meeting his eye.

“And you don’t run a podcast or anything?”

“No, I’ve never done anything like that.” His voice has taken on a strange tone, in Harley’s opinion, but he’s already said he’s worn out. This could just be what Peter sounds like when he hasn’t run four blocks. “Why?”

“No reason, sorry,” Harley says quickly, keen to move on from the topic. Of course it was ridiculous, but to relieve the tension, he adds, “I’d remember a face like yours.”

“Likewise,” Peter replies with a grin. “Shall we take a walk?”

Harley raises an eyebrow. “It’s raining.”

“Then we’ll get wet,” he says cheerfully, and Harley chuckles, and pulls up the hood of his raincoat.

They walk side by side through Manhattan’s busy streets, darting between store canopies as the rain grows heavier.

As they run past one of the tourist boutiques, Harley swipes a cheap umbrella, and as he puts it up, Peter shoots him a suspicious look. “Where did you get that?”

“Found it,” Harley says innocently, and Peter narrows his eyes.

“You found it,” he repeats wryly.

“Oh, come on,” Harley protests. “Don’t be such a square. It was one of those brand stores, and the prices are basically robbery anyway.”

He rolls his eyes, and Harley grins as Peter steps under the umbrella all the same, their shoulders brushing against each other as they walk. “Where are we headed?” Peter asks, scowling up at Fisk Tower as they pass by.

Harley points across the road, and they swerve over the pedestrian crossing. “I thought we could walk through the park.” Peter nods contentedly, and Harley hesitates before offering him his hand. Peter takes it, threading his fingers through Harley’s, and they wander alongside the big pond in the park’s southeast corner.

“How was decathlon?” Harley asks at one point, and Peter winces.

“Pretty sure I’ll be hearing about having bailed with half an hour left of practice.”

“I doubt it,” Harley says with a low chuckle. “Ned said you’re a genius.”

“Yes, well, I think you got the measure of Ned,” Peter replies, swinging their hands between them.

As they pass the amusement park, Harley glances at Peter, taking in his doe-eyed wonder at his surroundings. It’s exceptionally endearing, but Harley can’t help asking, “You never been to Central Park before?”

“Not since I was little,” Peter shrugs. “Well, once more recently, but it was dark at the time.”

“You came here in the dark?” Harley says in alarm. “You’re insane.”

“Why?”

“I mean, New York by night is dangerous enough,” Harley says incredulously. “But the park’s even more isolated.”

“I was perfectly careful,” Peter says earnestly, and Harley raises an eyebrow.

“Clearly you’re more of a badass than I took you for.”

Peter opens his mouth in indignation. “Excuse me, I am _absolutely_ a badass.”

“Pete, we met because you left me a message in a notebook, abandoned on a shelf in a library,” Harley says, trying not to laugh.

“Yes, well, I – ” he starts to retort, but then he pauses. “You called me ‘Pete’,” he adds curiously. “No one says that.”

“Is that okay?” Harley asks, worried he’s put his foot in it. “I don’t have to.”

He considers it. “It’s okay if it’s you,” he concludes. Harley smiles and squeezes his hand.

By the time they reach the Bow bridge, the rain is pounding on the umbrella with such force that they can hardly hear each other, and Harley’s having to lean over to make out what Peter’s trying to say. A sudden gust of wind, however, catches him unawares, and the umbrella folds itself inside out and shoots out of his hand into the lake, startling a small group of ducks idling in the water.

“Oops,” he says feebly, as Peter bursts out laughing. “Sorry.”  
“It doesn’t matter,” Peter says, his drenched curls hanging low on his forehead, water dripping from his long eyelashes. “It’s not like we paid for it, anyway.” Without even really thinking about it, Harley slips a hand around Peter’s waist, and Peter settles against him, grumbling good-naturedly that Harley’s jacket is cold, as they gaze out over the lake, watching the geese swarm around chunks of bread thrown by a delighted child on the shore.

After a few moments, Harley turns to Peter and brushes his hair out of his eyes for him, and at his nod, lifts Peter’s chin with one hand and presses his lips gently against Peter’s for the first time. It doesn’t last long – only a few seconds later, he’s pulled away and is searching Peter’s face for a reaction. A smile is etched across Peter’s face, though, and this time, he raises his heels marginally off the ground to kiss Harley. He reciprocates in earnest, neither noticing nor caring about the cool water seeping through the protective sheen of his rain jacket, their hands finding each other’s and locking defiantly together as if to say, _this is ours._

When they finally break away, Peter falls against him and buries his head in Harley’s shoulder. Harley desperately wants to put into words everything he’s feeling – but somehow he doesn’t really know how, and besides, he doesn’t want to scare Peter with the intensity of his emotions. That time will come; now, it’s just about a walk in the rain and the sudden, overwhelming realisation that Harley just kissed a boy in broad daylight, on a public bridge, in the middle of the biggest city in America.

He’s just processing this when he feels Peter shiver, and realises that the rain is by no means easing, and it’s starting to get dark.

“Come on,” he says abruptly. “You can’t go home in this state, come back to my place and you can borrow some clothes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, of course,” Harley says, seizing Peter’s hand. “You’ll freeze to death otherwise.”

Hand-in-hand, they break into a run and jog all the way to the subway station at the park’s western border. Once they’re under cover, Peter shrugs off his rain jacket and wrings it out onto the floor, earning him a dirty look from one of the station staff.

“Look at you,” Harley teases, flicking a droplet of water from his coat and making Peter squeak in protest. “Becoming a rebel, I see.”

“I’m already a rebel,” Peter says haughtily.

Harley raises a sceptical eyebrow and kisses him on the forehead. “Okay.”

The train arrives a few moments later, and they ride a few stops until they’re a block or two from Harley’s apartment. “I never asked,” Harley says as they step out of the train car, “if you live out in Queens, how come you were able to come to Manhattan so often?”

“Oh.” Peter grins nervously. “I think I mentioned I have an internship in the city?”

“Ah, yes,” Harley says mysteriously. “The famous internship. I can finally ask – where exactly is it?”

Peter coughs. “Stark Industries.”

Despite the rain, Harley stops dead. “Shut up. No it isn’t.” Peter smiles, looking sheepish. “You work with _Tony Stark_ , and I asked you what you thought of the Avengers?”

“It’s okay,” Peter laughs. “I gave you my honest opinion, but yes, the irony is clear.”

“What do you even do?” Harley asks, halting outside an apartment building and slides a key into the lock.

“I design stuff for the Avengers,” Peter says truthfully. “Gadgets and such. That’s my… area of expertise, I guess.”

“That’s awesome,” Harley exclaims, briefly letting go of Peter’s hand to call the elevator, but he takes it again immediately after. “I know this probably sounds lame compared to _anything_ you’ve done, but I actually met Spider-Man a couple of months ago.”

The beat of silence before Peter responds is fractionally too long, in Harley’s opinion. “No kidding! How come?”

“There was a gas leak in the building I used to work in, and it exploded,” Harley says earnestly. “Spider-Man saved us – me and a few of my colleagues, that is.”

“That’s… that must have been terrifying.” There’s that strange tone from the library again.

“It was insane. Funnily enough I had to find a new job after that.” He’s being flippant, but turns suddenly sombre. “Honestly, I thought I was going to die.”

“Guess it shows you can’t take anything for granted,” Peter says; he sounds a little more normal, but Harley makes a mental note to ask him about it.

His reply catches in his throat as the elevator arrives with a _ding_ and the doors slide open. Peter’s talking again, but Harley freezes, only vaguely aware of Peter’s voice in the background; most of his attention is being used to work out why the _fuck_ his father is stepping out of the elevator.

“D…dad?” he stutters, and Peter falls abruptly silent.

“Harley,” says the man before him, and Harley can feel him wordlessly cross-examining him, taking in his soaking wet clothes, his untamed hair, and most prominently, the way his hand is defiantly gripping Peter’s.

“What are you doing here?” Harley demands, and he can feel the blood rushing to his face.

“Your mom called me,” his father replies coolly. “She’s frantic, she’s been calling everyone she could think of. The school, that friend of yours – hell, she’s even called the cops twice.”

“W-why?”

“I imagine it’s something to do with the fact that she expected you home three hours ago, and you decided not to let her, or anyone else, know where you’ve been.” His dad’s voice is rising threateningly, but Harley stands his ground.

“Well – ” Harley’s retort about how he expected his father home eleven _years_ ago is cut off by Peter, who squeezes his hand and shakes his head minutely. He takes a few deep breaths to settle his temper and pulls Peter into the elevator.

“Where do you think you’re going, young man?” his father snaps, but the doors are starting to close.

“This isn’t any of your business,” Harley says, his voice cold but considerably more calm. “It never has been.” The doors shut with a hiss, and the ancient elevator rattles upwards.

“Are you okay?” Peter asks quietly, stroking the back of Harley’s hand with his thumb.

“I think I’m in some serious shit,” Harley says with a shaky laugh. “If she called my dad, she must be really worried.” He pauses a moment, phrasing his next sentence carefully. “Also, I don’t think now is the best time to tell her about us?”

“That’s fair,” Peter nods, and slips his hand out of Harley’s. “Come here.” He pulls Harley into a reassuring hug, and they break apart as the elevator slows to a stop at Harley’s floor.

The next ten minutes are kind of a blur. Sure enough, his mother is furious, and a blazing row ensues between them, to which Peter is polite enough to pretend he is not listening. His mother accuses Harley of failing to ever consider her feelings, while Harley rages at her for attempting _again_ to involve his dad in his life when he has no business to be. In response, she shoots back that she wouldn’t have had to get his father involved if Harley had just been a little more responsible. After all, she points out, it’s not as though he’s never been in any life-threatening situations without her realising. Harley, for his part, iterates that this is an exceptionally good point, as the last time he _was_ in a life-threatening situation, she barely even noticed.

As concerns Peter, despite the heat of the moment, he invents a relatively convincing lie. He tells her that they were hanging out (which is true), and were walking to the subway when a passing truck ran through a puddle and soaked them (which is not). He then adds that he offered to lend Peter some dry clothes to get home in; to Harley’s relief, it seems that his final argument has hit home, and she doesn’t ground him. Instead, she sends them away to change their clothes, while she telephones the police and the school to let them know that he’s returned.

“Sorry you had to see that,” Harley says weakly as he closes the bedroom door behind them, and if he didn’t know better, he’d say Peter’s returning smile was slightly forced. “Although for what it’s worth, it probably would have been worse if you hadn’t been here.”

“Yikes,” says Peter with a wobbly laugh, by now practically shaking with cold.

“Take those off, I won’t look.” He turns away from Peter and starts rummaging through the closet for some clean clothes he can lend Peter, as well as something for himself. He throws a sweatshirt over the door which is obscuring Peter from his view, and Harley hears him hastily putting it on. “Jeans or sweatpants?”

“Sweats are fine,” Peter replies, so Harley throws them over too, before pulling off his own sodden garments and changing into some dry ones. “I’m done,” Peter calls a few moments later, and Harley closes the closet and steps away.

He has to admit, it’s slightly odd to see someone else wearing his clothes; that said, the sweatshirt is just a _little_ too big for Peter and his fingers are protruding from the sleeves, which is absurdly endearing.

“Thanks for this,” Peter says, sounding tired for the first time; presumably the adrenaline of the afternoon is wearing off.

“It’s no problem,” Harley shrugs. “I’ll get you a grocery bag for your wet clothes.” Peter smiles gratefully as they re-enter the kitchen, where a tin radio is announcing the evening news.

“ _…our top story tonight: the_ Daily Bugle _released an exposé a few hours ago, detailing a cover-up by several of the major banking firms, who have experienced security breaches on irregular nights over the last two weeks, including one only last night._ ”

“Really affirms your trust in the big companies, doesn’t it?” Harley remarks, and Peter hums, apparently only half-listening.

“ _Although the motives and connection between these breaches is unclear, many of these companies have reported a sharp decline in customer satisfaction. Wells Fargo and Co., to name one, has lost dozens of accounts in Queens and Brooklyn alone._ ”

Harley opens his mouth to speak again, but Peter flaps a hand and shakes his head.

“ _Curiouser still are eyewitness reports of a solitary figure spotted on rooftops near the affected establishments on the nights they were breached. Many are speculating that local New York vigilante and newly-recruited Avenger, Spider-Man, is co-ordinating this malign operation._ ”

Harley snorts, and pulls a plastic grocery bag from one of the kitchen cupboards. “Yeah, as if. The whole saving-people thing is absolutely to cover up a heist.”

“He’s not even an Avenger,” Peter murmurs absently. As the reporter moves on to talk about the upcoming local election, he shakes himself out of his reverie and meets Harley’s eye again. “It’s late, I should go.”

“Yeah, sure. Don’t get in trouble because of me.”

“Oh, I won’t,” Peter assures him. “I texted my aunt on the way to the library and told her I’d be late.”

“Good, good.” Harley plunges his hands in his pockets, trying to work up some courage. “Can I see you again?”

Peter gives him a strange, amused look. “Of… of course?”

Harley breathes a sigh of relief and chuckles. “Okay, cool.” He wants to ask when, but he’s also aware of coming across as pathetic and needy, and he doesn’t want Peter to think that of him.

He’s saved the trouble, though, because Peter immediately says, “I’m free during the day tomorrow, if you like?”

“Yes,” Harley says, a little too quickly to be cool; but then again, he’s pretty sure they’re past the point of Peter thinking he’s cool. “I mean, sure, whatever,” he adds with a shrug, making Peter laugh.

He pulls Harley in for one final kiss, then smiles. “Guess I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” he remarks, and raises a shy hand in farewell as Harley closes the door behind him.

“You’re lucky Mom went to take the trash out,” says a dry voice from behind him, and he whirls around to see Abbie standing at the bathroom door, her arms crossed across her chest. “So that’s why you were so late, because you were off sucking face with _him_.”

Harley’s cheeks burn. “Don’t say it like that,” he says feebly.

“Are you going to tell Mom?”

“Eventually.”

“What about Dad?”

“Dad can get fucked.” She blinks at his bluntness. “I know he was here, by the way.”

“Yeah,” she replies bitterly, “to see you.”

“I don’t _want_ to see him,” he says, his voice fierce again. “Especially since…” _Since he doesn’t want to see you_ , he thinks, but deciding this isn’t tactful, he changes his approach. “Since he probably won’t want to see me anymore anyway.”

“Why?”

“Because he saw me and Pete holding hands as he got off the elevator,” he says, rolling his eyes. “And he’s not exactly the most progressive father, is he?”

“That’s his name? Peter?”

“Yeah.”

“He seemed nice,” she offers, and he smiles for the first time since the door closed.

“Yeah, he is,” he admits. “At least, I think he is. I technically only met him today.”

“Christ, you only met him today and you’re already kissing?”

“It’s…” He sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose. “It’s complicated.”

“What, did you meet online or something?”

“Can I plead the fifth?” he asks weakly, and Abbie scowls at him.

“No.”

“Fine. Then… sort of. It’s complicated.” She raises an eyebrow, and he shakes his head. “Nope, that’s it. That’s as much as you’re getting. Mind your own business.”

“Okay,” she shrugs, turning to head back to their room.

“Hey, Abbie?”

“What?”

“Don’t tell Mom,” he says, the words tumbling out of his mouth in a single, rushed breath. “Let me.”

“’A’ight,” she shrugs. “Do what you like. As you say – not my business.” Her tone is uninterested, but he thinks she means it, and he’s grateful.

“Thanks.”

“Whatever, nerd.”


	13. The Blackout - Peter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After an overwhelming day, Peter and Tony team up for an equally overwhelming patrol.

“Come on, Ned,” Peter mutters as soon as the phone starts ringing. He’s fully suited up, with Harley’s sweater still on, and his other clothes in his backpack, and swinging quickly between Harlem’s high-rises, hoping to drop onto the train as it crosses the Queensboro bridge. He whiplashes around a building and freefalls, landing cat-footed on an eastbound bus, using the reprieve to tap out a text to Ned. **_Stop everything. Call me._** This done, he springs into the air again, vaulting off a lamp-post and enjoying the cool evening wind rushing past his ears.

“ _Incoming call from Ned Leeds,_ ” Karen says in her smooth tones, connecting the call.

“Ned,” Peter says immediately, “Harley and I have met before.”

“ _How did it go?_ ” Ned’s voice is practically quivering with anticipation. “ _MJ’s here too, by the way._ ”

“ _Hey, loser,_ ” MJ calls out.

“Really? Why?” Peter doesn’t like to think of himself as the lynch-pin of their friendship group, but it isn’t all that often that the other two hang out without him. He tucks his arms and legs in as he tunnels through the leg beams of a rooftop water tank, and MJ replies as he falls back into another swing.

“ _We’re studying for the chemistry quiz,_ ” she says, sounding amused. “ _It’s on Monday. Did you forget again?_ ”

“Never mind that,” Peter says impatiently, making a loop in mid-air to catch his wallet as it slides out from one of his backpack’s compartments. “Harley – I’ve met him before, as Spider-Man. I got him out of that building which blew up in Manhattan a couple of months ago.”

“ _Are you serious?”_ Ned gasps. “ _Did he recognise you?_ ”

“Of course not!” He waves at Tony’s lab window as he passes Avengers Tower, before rolling into a high dive, heading east towards the river. “At least, I don’t think so.”

“ _Well, okay, how was it?_ ” Ned asks, sounding just as impatient as Peter did.

“It was…” Peter hesitates, suddenly bashful. “It was awesome. _He’s_ awesome. I mean, I knew he would be,” he adds hastily, “I just wasn’t sure if not talking for so long would make things weird, but it didn’t.”

“ _Peter pulled_ ,” he hears MJ say quietly to Ned, who lets out a _whoop_.

“Don’t make it weird,” Peter chuckles, and they both laugh.

“ _You can tell us all about it tomorrow,_ ” MJ adds, and Peter skids to a stop, resting his back against the arch of the bridge as he waits for the train. What’s she talking about?

“What’s happening tomorrow?”

“ _Yeah, I told you on Tuesday, we’re doing an extra decathlon practice, so we’re ready for state._ ”

Peter groans and lets his head hit the concrete; this is all he needs. “But I told Harley we’d meet up again!”

“ _But this is state, Peter!_ ” Ned protests. “ _If we lose, we can’t get to the summer nationals!_ ”

“Fine,” Peter grumbles. “But if he breaks up with me over this, I’m blaming you guys.” He taps his earpiece to disconnect the call. He hears the shrill toot of a train horn, and lets go of the arch, landing gracefully on the roof and crouching down to streamline himself. “Karen, call Harley.”

“ _Calling Harley Keener._ ”

“ _Hey,_ ” says the now-familiar voice seconds after the phone starts ringing. “ _Miss me already?_ ”

“I have an apology to make,” he says sadly, but Harley doesn’t seem to hear him.

“ _Pete, I can hardly hear you,_ ” he replies. “ _Are you, like, in a wind tunnel or something?_ ”

“Oh, I’m on the train,” he says loudly, reflecting with some sense of satisfaction that this statement has rarely been more accurate. “Someone’s left the window open.” He runs to the rear of the train and drops into the cab’s emergency doorway. “Is that better?”

“ _Much,_ ” says Harley. “ _What were you saying?_ ”

“I’m going to have to take a rain-check on tomorrow.”

“ _Already?_ ” he exclaims. “ _We only arranged it ten minutes ago!_ ”

“I’m really sorry,” Peter says, “I forgot MJ scheduled an extra decathlon practice. We have the state competition next week – with everything that’s been happening, I totally forgot.”

“ _I’m that distracting? You flatter me._ ”

To Peter’s relief, he sounds amused, not annoyed, but even if he had the heart to do so, he doesn’t know how he would explain that Harley is not all that’s on his mind. After all, the news report confirmed his suspicions that the bank robbery he foiled (wow, was that only last night?) was not an isolated incident. Not only that, but he is himself already being implicated, which means that despite Tony’s promise, he only has so long before the authorities order a manhunt on him in the absence of any other leads. He makes a mental note to call Tony and see if he has any updates on the situation.

“I try,” Peter replies instead, making Harley laugh.

“ _It’s okay,_ ” he says. “ _We’d only have had the morning, to be honest, because I totally forgot that I, in fact, have a job._ ”

“Speaking of which, you can tell me where you work now,” Peter points out, and Harley chuckles.

“ _True enough – but you still have to promise not to come and see me at work._ ”

“Cross my heart.”

“ _Jerry’s Pizza, a few blocks from my school._ ”

“Oh, that’s not bad. Its pepperoni is actually spicy,” Peter remarks.

“ _You’ve been?_ ”

“Yeah, years ago.” Peter smiles wistfully. “Every weekend my Uncle Ben would take me to a new pizza place somewhere in the city. He swore we’d try all of them before I turned eighteen.”

Harley’s quiet for a moment. “ _Do you want to talk about it? About him?_ ”

“Some other time,” Peter says gratefully, and Harley hums in acknowledgement. “Are you okay, by the way? That was a bit… intense, with your mom and dad.”

“ _Ugh, I’m fine,_ ” Harley says, with a deep sigh. “ _Honestly it could have been a lot worse – at least they weren’t there to get at each other._ ”

“Yikes.”

“ _Yeah._ ” Silence falls between them for a moment, then Harley adds, “ _You know, I think your being there made it easier for me to stand up to my dad, so… thanks, I guess._ ”

“No problem,” Peter says with a modest shrug. “Glad I could help.” The train slows to a stop, and Peter glances at the station sign. “Oh, this is my stop. I’ll call you tomorrow?”

“ _Sure, whenever. I’m working from twelve ‘til seven, though. So, actually, not whenever. But any other time._ ”

“Okay,” Peter chuckles. “Bye.” The call disconnects, and he vaults from the train roof to the station canopy.

Part of him wants to blow off his patrol for the evening and just crash in front of the television with May, but he’s already abandoned his post for several hours, and he hasn’t even had any dinner yet. Besides, being out in the city gives him headspace, and is really the only time he has to reflect on his day and be alone with his thoughts. Between high school and superhero work, Peter rarely finds that he has much time for introspection.

With this in mind, he doesn’t even bother to change out of his suit for dinner, and offers May a brief ‘good night’ as he dashes from the table, and leaps out of the window into the night, resolving to just spend a couple of hours in the neighbourhood, just to keep an eye on things, before heading home and (hopefully) getting a full nine hours before academic decathlon. _Curse MJ and her sadistic weekend practice_ , he thinks bitterly.

No one who’s ever met Peter would believe that all he really wants is a quiet life. Of course, he wouldn’t trade his powers for anything, but from time to time he can’t help feeling envious of Ned, who gets to go home and watch the new episode of _Black Lightning_ on Netflix, without having to then go out and _be_ the superhero. As jealous as they would be if they found out he can lift a car, none of his classmates have ever had to abandon their date at a school dance in favour of thwarting a dangerous weapons dealer dressed as a bird.

Truthfully, the last thing he wants to be doing is trying to uncover a criminal conspiracy to undermine New York’s banking system, when he could be making out with Harley, but he sighs as his uncle’s words come rushing back to him for the millionth time. After all, he has great power, and he has to wield it responsibly. As he passes the park, Peter recalls the first conversation he had with Tony, when he stated that if he sat back and did nothing, then the bad things that happened would be his fault. _How true it still is,_ he thinks gloomily, as he bounces off a shop canopy and lands on the sidewalk to help a young man who’s struggling to lift a sturdy writing desk into a parked U-Haul truck. By way of thanks, the young man buys Peter a hot pretzel from a nearby vendor, then he heads off again to continue his patrol.

It felt strange, talking to Harley about Uncle Ben tonight. He doesn’t talk about him much with anyone, and he’s always been sort of okay with this fact, having accepted the topic as something that just wasn’t discussed. Now, though, he wonders why that is, and why he actually feels better for sharing a memory of him with Harley. _Maybe I should consider therapy after all_ , he muses; there is, however, a good reason he’s thus far declined Tony’s offers to set him up with one. If he went as Peter Parker, there’s no way he could talk about anything related to being Spider-Man, but if he went as Spider-Man, he’d constantly worry that his enemies would find out he was seeing a therapist, and would try and coerce information out of them. In his mind, it’s a lose-lose situation.

Peter sighs as he lifts his mask to his nose, and takes a bite from the pretzel, which is a very welcome gesture. He doesn’t often receive tokens of gratitude, and he genuinely doesn’t need them: he helps because it’s right, not because he wants to be thanked. Nevertheless, it feels good to be appreciated, and besides, he often ends up feeling peckish whilst out on patrol.

He’s barely halfway through it when a light in the sky catches his attention, growing closer and brighter – and, incidentally, louder. He tenses, ready to abandon the pretzel and fight if it turns out to be hostile, but he relaxes as he recognises the familiar shine of a titanium-alloy suit.

“Hey, kid,” says the warm, muted voice of Tony Stark. “Good to see you’re working hard.” With his mouth full of warm, sweet dough, Peter lets out a muffled squeak of indignation, making his mentor chuckle. “Anyway, the police have had a tip-off that there’s another robbery going down in the Bronx. Thought it might get tricky, so I’m headed over. Want to come?”

“Sure,” Peter says indistinctly.

“Grab on – you can finish your snack on the way.” The repulsors on Tony’s hands and feet flare up, and Peter latches on with a web-line as he launches into the air.

“Hey, Mr Stark?” Peter calls as he swallows the final mouthful. “Do you think it’s this Hobgoblin guy?”

“Could be,” Tony replies, speaking through Peter’s earpiece to avoid shouting over the wind. “Hard to say until we get there. After all, he hasn’t physically turned up to the other robberies.”

“You believed me, then,” Peter adds, swinging upwards and sitting on Tony’s back like a magic carpet.

“Of course I believed you!” They’re approaching the bridge where Peter stopped the joyrider, although the fence has long since been repaired. “I just couldn’t act simply on a hunch from Spider-Man.”

Peter allows himself a smile of triumphant vindication, looking happily out over the city lights. It’s not often he gets such a good view. To his left sprawls Manhattan; somehow, its colossal skyscrapers seem even bigger from a distance, their scattered lights crawling up the skyline. The Tower’s enormous neon-blue letter ‘A’ shines out among them, legible even from all the way out here.

Peter narrows his eyes to a squint as it seems to flicker, unsure if he’s imagining it, but then, as though someone flipped a switch, Avengers Tower’s lights fade and go black. Then the Empire State Building, the Chrysler building, the Trade Centre, Vanderbilt – one by one, they all go dark, followed in quick succession by the rest of Manhattan’s lights. He looks down, and the Bronx is dark. Starting to panic, Peter twists his head around, and sure enough, where there should be a vast patchwork of lights from Queens and Brooklyn, it’s pitch black.

“Uh, Mr Stark?”

“Yeah, I see it,” he says grimly, gathering speed.

His headset’s ringing, and he taps his earpiece to connect the call. “Aunt May, are you alright?”

“I’m fine, but where are you? The whole city’s dark!”

“Over the Bronx, with Mr Stark. We’re gonna fix it.” He stifles a shriek and clings more tightly to the Iron Man suit as Tony swoops into a steep dive. “I have to go. Stay inside, yeah?”

“Be safe,” she says quickly before the call disconnects.

“Mr Stark, what’s going on?”

“Someone’s drained the entire power grid,” he replies. “I’ve had FRIDAY run a scan on the bank we’re headed to, and guess what?”

“Power surge?”

“Right in one,” Tony says, and Peter jumps off his back so he can swing again. “The bank itself is drained, but _something_ there is operating at fifteen thousand percent of the entire building’s usual power consumption.”

Peter sprints along a terrace wall and whips around the corner – he forgot how difficult it can be to keep up with Iron Man at near-full speed. “What’s the plan?”

“No idea,” Tony replies abruptly. “Making this up as I go. Would you believe I’m missing my own anniversary dinner for this?”

“Yeah, actually,” Peter says, using his elasticated webbing to slingshot himself off a lamp-post, giving him a burst of speed. They’re approaching the bank, and red-and-blue lights illuminate the unlit streets. Peter lands on the bank’s roof, while Tony descends to street level to talk to the police. While he’s waiting, Peter feels the building beneath his feet tremble. “Hey, Mr Stark, is the bank supposed to be shaking?” Tony immediately turns his head, and Peter can tell he’s conducting a visual scan of the building – presumably assessing its structural integrity.

“Spider-Man, move!” Tony’s words come a fraction of a second too late, as the sound of breaking roof tiles fills Peter’s ears, and something hard hits him in the back of the skull with enough force to knock him off the building.

“Shit!” he gasps as he freefalls, his head spinning, but he manages to shoot out a web-line and turn the fall into a swing. In his peripheral vision, he spots the figure, clutching two big bags of cash, disappearing over a rooftop. Fighting through waves of headache-induced nausea, Peter makes chase, determined not to let the mastermind escape again, despite the fact that he can barely see. “Karen, who is that?”

“ _Analysing assailant_ ,” she says calmly. “ _In the meantime, you appear to be developing a concussion. You should rest._ ”

“That can wait,” he snaps back. “Who _is_ it?”

“ _Fugitive identified as Mac Gargan._ ”

“Scorpion?” Peter asks, baffled. “He was only convicted eighteen months ago, who the hell signed off on his parole?”

“ _Unclear. Should I call Mr Stark?_ ”

“Not yet. I took him down once, I can do it again.”

Sure enough, he seems to be gaining on him, and eventually he shoots out a web-line and seizes Scorpion by the tail, digging his heels into the road in an attempt to slow him down.

“Mind your own business, insect!” Scorpion yells, and Peter splutters with umbrage.

“Who are you calling _insect_?” he calls indignantly. “I’m, like, ninety-nine percent sure scorpions and spiders are both arachnids!”

“Who cares?” Scorpion snarls, and flicks his tail upwards, throwing Peter into the air, before slamming him into a wall on the other side of the street.

“Home run,” Peter says feebly, forcing himself to jump back into the action as his foe takes flight once more. “What if I told you I just want to talk?” he shouts, acutely aware of the absurdity of trying to engage a thief-turned-murderer in civil conversation.

“What if I told you to fuck off?” his adversary calls back, not slowing down for a moment.

“That would just be rude,” Peter replies, “and I’ve only ever been polite to you!”

“You landed me a life sentence!”

“Which you clearly thought was unjustified, if you’ve escaped,” he points out, and apparently he’s touched a nerve, because Scorpion finally stops and whirls around, his steel-gloved fist narrowly missing Peter’s face. He tries with the tail instead, but it sinks into the road, where Peter promptly covers it in webs, securing it. “How come you just keep trying to hit me with that thing, anyway? Run out of poison, or something?”

“Something like that,” he growls. “Or maybe I was just being merciful.”

At this ridiculous statement, Peter actually laughs aloud. “You? Merciful? That’s like saying…” He pauses as he webs Scorpion’s fists together. “Oh, man, I can’t think of an analogy! That’s embarrassing.” One titanic punch knocks the incapacitated Scorpion to the ground. “Seriously, I’m totally drawing a blank here. Put it down to tiredness, I guess. Anyway, why go to all this effort to rob one bank? Draining the entire city’s power grid - little excessive, don’t you think?”

With an unexpected surge of strength, Scorpion rips his tail from the ground, and Peter has to leap into the air to avoid a hit which he reckons would probably have knocked him unconscious.

“We’re done here,” Scorpion mutters as three squad cars round the corner and skid to a stop fifty feet from them.

“But I thought we were bonding!” Peter protests, and Scorpion smirks.

“Here’s your share,” he says, loudly enough for the whole street to hear, and Peter instinctively catches the money bag that Scorpion throws to him.

“What the..?”

“See you around.”

Seeing Peter’s confusion, Scorpion seizes the opportunity and makes a run for it, disappearing around a corner as police gunfire bounces off his armour. Peter makes to follow, but a sharp jolt of electricity hits him in the back and knocks him to the ground. The police surround him, one holding a taser gun.

“Stand up!” one orders.

“What gives?” Peter asks with a groan, as the pain coursing through his veins subsides.

“I said stand up!”

“Stop this!” shouts a voice, and Iron Man descends into the ring, directing his hand repulsors at the police officers pointing guns at Peter. “What the hell are you doing?” he demands.

The sergeant clears her throat and speaks up. “Mr Stark, we have reason to believe that Spider-Man is in league with the perpetrator.”

“Bullshit,” Tony says bluntly. “Spider-Man put Scorpion behind bars more than a year ago! Why would he team up with him now?”

“Then how do you explain the fact that he just gave Spider-Man one of his money bags?” the sergeant replies coldly. “Or the fact that eyewitnesses report his presence at the other incidents?”

This seems to throw Tony a little, and he turns to Peter, baffled. “He did what?”

“I don’t know why,” Peter says weakly, still sore from the fight and the taser. “It’s over there, you can take it back to the bank.”

“We can’t, it’s evidence now,” says one of the officers, and the sergeant nods her approval.

“I ought to take you in,” she says thoughtfully, “but realistically I don’t think we could make anything stick without more evidence.”

“Yeah, because he’s innocent,” Tony interjects, but she ignores him.

“Consider this a warning, Spider-Man. The other departments will be watching you.” She turns away, and her squad follows her back to the cars.

Finally, Tony is able to stoop to the ground and help Peter up. “You okay, Parker?”

“Spectacular,” he mutters, stumbling a little as he gets to his feet.

“Whoa, steady,” Tony says gently. “Come on, I’ll take you home.” Too exhausted to protest, Peter climbs up the Iron Man suit and clings on like a monkey as Tony rises into the air. He lifts his head wearily, and can see that the Manhattan lights have started to flicker back on.

“You got the power back?” he mumbles, and Tony shakes his head.

“Wasn’t me,” he replies. “The city has backup generators. I imagine Scorpion just needed to drain it for a few minutes so as not to trip the security alarms.”

“Didn’t work, though,” Peter points out, his head splitting from the physical turmoil it’s undergone in the last hour. “Both you and the police knew he was there.”

“That _is_ odd,” Tony says thoughtfully. “I wonder who ratted him out?” Peter shrugs, and Tony seems to hesitate before speaking again. “Just to be clear… you’re not involved, right?”

The question takes Peter by such surprise that he’s rendered momentarily speechless. “Of course not!” he says angrily, utterly insulted.

“I had to check,” Tony adds defensively. “People can be disappointing.”

“You know what?” Peter glances down to confirm they’re over the river and back in Queens. “I’ll get myself home.” Without a word of farewell, he tumbles from Tony’s back, activating his suit’s electromagnetic pulse to blind FRIDAY’s scanning software long enough to get away. Of course, he knows where Peter lives, but he doubts Tony would come looking for him at home tonight.

He can’t think of a time when he’s been more angry. Whatever Scorpion and the Hobgoblin are up to, they’ve managed to implicate him, successfully enough even to cause Tony to doubt him. And if Tony decides he doesn’t trust him… well, he can wave the suit goodbye, with all likelihood. _You’d think_ , he reflects furiously, _that saving millions of dollars of his equipment and not taking any of it would show Mr Stark whose side I’m on._

But as this crosses his mind, he’s struck by his mentor’s words. _People can be disappointing…_ Surely he must be talking about Captain America – Peter knows the story better than most, and he knows there was a time when the two friends would have died for each other. Now, though, Tony’s lips purse and his expression goes hard if he so much as hears the name _Steve Rogers_ in a news bulletin.

May’s waiting in his bedroom when he crawls through the window; he collapses onto the floor and leans against the heater with a guttural groan.

“Oh my god,” she breathes, crouching down to his level as he pulls off his mask, his face bruised and his curls tousled. “What happened?”

“Scorpion robbed a bank,” he mumbles, his voice hoarse from shouting all night. “Now the police and Mr Stark think I’m involved.”

“Mr Stark?” she repeats in disbelief. “How can he think that?”

“Because Scorpion’s clever,” he snaps, then exhales deeply. “Sorry,” he adds wearily. “I’m not mad at you.”

“Oh, sweetie, I know,” she says, joining him on the floor and putting an arm around his shoulder. “So what are we going to do about it?”

He shrugs aimlessly. “Not be Spider-Man for a bit, I suppose,” he says quietly. “They can’t catch me at anything if I’m not out there.”

“That’s true,” she agrees, “but would you be able to let things go?”

“What do you mean?”

“I know you, Peter,” she says affectionately. “You have a tendency to blame yourself for stuff that isn’t your fault. If you’re going to take a break – which I fully support – you need to remember that things may happen in your absence that you can’t stop.”

As he thinks about this, he realises she has a point: in order to exonerate himself, he has to be willing to let Scorpion and the Hobgoblin continue to get away with their schemes.

“Yeah,” he says finally.

“Do you think you can do that?”

“Well, it’s not like I helped stop Scorpion tonight anyway,” he says with a single derisive laugh. “Or the Hobgoblin last night, so, yeah, I think I can do that.”

“Attaboy,” she says warmly, kissing the top of his head. “Go take a bath.”

“May, it’s one o’clock in the morning.”

“And you will feel a lot less sore in the morning if you bathe before you go to bed,” she replies firmly. “Go.” He doesn’t bother arguing, instead opting to reply to Harley’s unanswered texts. So much for an early night – no matter how many different ways he looks at it, the situation just became a whole lot more complicated.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you like this story! If so, I love to hear your thoughts, so leave a comment or hit me up on Tumblr (@tea-for-one-please)!


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